The METICOS consortium has identified the need for “no gate crossing point solutions” in order ‘to allow for the seamless crossing of borders and security checks without the risk of invading people’s privacy, and gain the societal and political acceptance of these technologies, taking into account the human factor, the social and societal aspects, providing a secure environment for travel and for host countries.

Thus, METICOS project is developing a platform that integrates information systems and networks of data sources in order to validate the efficiency and users acceptance of border control technologies. The proposed platform will provide metrics and KPIs to authorities and decision-makers, based on a number of independent variables: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, physical privacy, accuracy, information privacy, ethical and societal perceptions, securing positive societal impact and maximize border control process efficiency.

To maximize the impact of the project, METICOS will join the European Initiative for Smart Borders and contribute aforementioned cross-border and cross-cultural Big Data Analysis and decision support systems that feature harvesting of multi-lingual and cross-sectorial data from heterogeneous sources, different analytics approaches and risk assessment methods. METICOS will be demonstrated and validated under real operating conditions. This will involve two pilot implementations executed in five different countries involving real travellers and staff. Furthermore, the METICOS ecosystem aims to work closely with border control research initiatives to demonstrate its operational performance improvements by means of combined validation with these solutions.