TSA Reveals Open Architecture Roadmap to Elevate Screening Capabilities

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) published its Open Architecture (OA) Roadmap to help define the government agency’s long-term strategy to enhance screening capabilities.

The OA is a technology-designed approach for software and hardware that uses widely accepted standards to ensure interoperability across tools and platforms regardless of the technology designer, manufacturer or supplier.

By using this approach, TSA officials can increase the number of available partners who supply improved technology quickly and at a lower cost. The OA Roadmap has four main goals; engagement, technical standards and capabilities, data sharing and organizational policies and procedures.

“Open architecture directly supports TSA’s mission and its workforce, while further protecting the nation’s transportation systems,” TSA Administrator David Pekoske said. “This roadmap outlines how TSA will prioritize agile and flexible technologies that strengthen our ability to quickly develop, test, deploy and maintain new capabilities.”

“All future contracting efforts for TSA’s airport security screening solutions will require vendors to provide equipment or software that comes from a common software framework, is interoperable, can be easily upgraded and is resilient to emerging cybersecurity threats,” Pekoske continued.

The TSA revealed that its OA vision is a connected transportation system in which state-of-the-art solutions are quickly adopted to address emerging threats and enable a dynamic screening environment.

Over the last five years, the agency has accelerated its efforts related to OA and is well positioned to take the next steps to operationalize mature OA concepts while applying lessons learned from other government efforts and TSA’s innovation experience.