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CONNECTOR will complement the Common Information Sharing Environment (CISE) and the Extended Common Information Sharing Environment (e-CISE) by developing the Customs Extended Common Information Sharing Environment (CE-CISE).

The technological solution developed in the project will be fully integrated with the CISE and e-CISE solutions, enhancing the focus on Customs agencies across Europe and building on the aspirations for European Integrated Border Management.

CONNECTOR will design and deliver an integration platform, which will emulate the existing Command & Control (C2) systems used by Customs and Border Authorities. The project will develop further a system, which has already been tested in both maritime and land environments and is fully compatible with CISE and e-CISE.

The overall goal of the CONNECTOR solution is to showcase the potential of CISE across all of the different sectors, demonstrating that it will be possible for it to be embedded in any C2 system, regardless of the area of operation. Most important of all is that this will pave the way for existing Customs practitioners to join the CISE network with minimal effort.

Authorities responsible for Integrated Border Management (IBM) in the EU already have risk assessment processes and systems in place to protect citizens from a set of risks, although they are owned and operated separately.

CONNECTOR will introduce a shared risk assessment mechanism, correlating different risk indicators that will enable the automatic exchange of data and sharing of risk assessment outcomes. The ultimate scope of CONNECTOR will be to design, adapt and integrate the necessary elements for the Risk Assessment and Natural Language Processing (NLP) components into the final technological solution.

National customs administrations in the EU form the operational backbone of the EU Customs Union. Currently, the Union Customs Code (UCC) is in place and there are defined specifications for the IT systems implemented by all countries.

CONNECTOR is developing a Decision Support System that will help Customs officers to make better-informed decisions with improved information and greater situational awareness. The benefits of the system mean that Customs will be able to (i) facilitate legal trade and the free movement of people by reducing waiting times at the border, (ii) help officers to allocate resources to identified key areas and (iii) utilise machine learning to continually auto-improve the system.

Data Fusion integrates multiple data sources to produce more consistent, accurate and useful information and a Digital Twin is set of adaptive models that emulate the behaviour of a physical system or process in a virtual system or process, getting real time data to update itself continually.

The level of digital design in many industries is currently relatively low and the basic mathematical and simulation models needed to support the construction of digital twin technology systems are not yet established. Future work therefore requires efforts on filling the gap between low digital design level and high demand for Digital Twins. In this innovation activity, the goal is to propose a unified framework for digital twins in Border Management systems.

An important challenge that needs to be addressed is the optimum way to handle the vast amount of data, which may come from multiple sources, be of different types and be non-structured. Add to this the need to process the data rapidly in (almost) real-time. To overcome these challenges, it will be essential to go beyond the traditional data management systems and to use cutting-edge Data Lake technologies and methodologies, tailored for the needs of IBM.

CONNECTOR will build modern and customised Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence techniques (e.g. Natural Language Processing) to integrate and rapidly process the vast amount of miscellaneous input data that will be produced. This data will be stored and managed in suitable Data Lakes, so that it is possible to enhance situational awareness and enable fast risk assessment and decision making.

To build on the significant work already completed in the development of CISE and to go beyond the State-of-the-Art, CONNECTOR will exploit the research outcomes and lessons learnt of a number of projects, which include ANDROMEDA, EFFECTOR, PROMENADE, PROFILE, INSPECTR, PRECINCT-r and BorderUAS.

CONNECTOR’s work will include interconnecting Customs Authorities with Border Authorities through CISE and proposing an interoperability framework to facilitate information exchange; offer different instances of the C3i system that simulates legacy Command & Control systems, regardless of their origin, as well as integrating them into CISE and e-CISE; further develop previous technologies to enhance situational awareness; bring valuable new data sources from end users to a broader CISE environment. This is not an exhaustive list of the project’s outputs, however.