Advanced risk assessment solution for government agencies and trading organizations
Shipment risk detection
IBM Advanced Cargo Analysis (ACA) assesses the risks of international shipments based on trading documents (customs declarations, cargo manifests bill-of-lading and air waybill) and other external and historical data.
Based on the risk assessment, ACA identifies cargo that might be dangerous, illegal or otherwise requiring an inspection—before it arrives at the destination port. This process improves border security and reduces the opportunity for fraud and smuggling. Depending on the risk, containment or inspection actions are taken.
The ACA asset performs the risk assessment in near real time and produces advice for follow-on actions. It handles the workflow toward a rules engine (IBM ODM) and provides an extensive user interface to support the user to make an informed decision.
Inspection decision and execution are separated, which makes the inspection staff less likely to be exposed to attempts to be bribed.
The rule-based systems usually double the hit-rate of the inspection staff, allowing either reduction of staff or increase of security.
Traders can be informed in advance, allowing them to better plan their cargo handling.
A roadmap for continuous improvement allowing to extend with machine learning models and usage of extra data sources.
Key features
- Automatically assess declaration, bill-of-lading and air waybill documents
- Enrichment with historical trader information
- Registration of inspection results to support continuous improvement
- Maintain internal and external watch lists
- Matching of traders against reference data based on natural language processing
- Browser-based user interface to support manual decisions with build-in task list
- Optional integration with BPM engines for external workflows
- WCO-based data repository
- Basic rules are set with risk profiles that can be extended by the client’s experts
- Maintain risk profiles using standard ODM tools
- Administration for default control instructions, out channels, watch list, trader reconciliation
Cargo assessment
- Improve trade security
- Deployment skills
Bringing the strength of analytics to improve trade security
IBM Advanced Cargo Analytics brings the power of modern analytics to the authorities to perform real-time risk assessment based on available documents. These documents can include air waybills, sea bill-of-ladings and customs declarations.
Automated risk profiles are used to perform risk assessment and analytics on historical data is used to allow for continuous improvement.
The Advanced Cargo Analytics can be used as a fully automated selection tool. It can also offer its benefits as a decision support tool where input documents and found risks are used, aiding the user to register a final decision.
Effort, time and skills needed to deploy the asset
The ACA asset is a specialized set of tools to support the specific needs of national targeting centers, customs agencies and port authorities.
The assets collect, sort and transform shipment data found in logistic documents and customs declarations. Then, this data is screened for the presence of known elements or patterns of behavior that might indicate a potential threat in the transportation networks.
The assets provide warnings to analysts so that they can validate the threat and raise an alert, using the inbuilt workflow and case management contained in the asset.
As such ACA projects need to be implemented with the assistance of subject matter experts in the highly sensitive world of advanced border security.
While projects take between 2–5 years from inception to production, the installation and configuration of the ACA asset will take around 1 month for the items that are ready for immediate use, assuming that the underlying infrastructure is in place.
Skills required: IBM ODM
Resources
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