BODEGA is a three-year research project co-funded by the European Commission within the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation - Horizon 2020 under the topic BES-14-2014: Ethical Societal Dimension, Human factors in border control - Proactive Enhancement of Human Performance in Border Control.
The project started on 1 June 2015 and is coordinated by VTT (Technical Research Centre of Finland) with a consortium consisting of 15 partners from seven European countries: VTT, CEA, AIT, Thales, UIC – International Union of Railways, CEIS, University of Namur, ATOS, Zanasi & Partners Ubium, Happywise, Hellenic Border Guard, Finnish Border Guard – RAJA, ADM.
The aim of the project is to build expertise at the European level about Human Factors at border lines in a way to enhance its efficiency without side effects to the end users (border control agents and managers and land, air and maritime travellers).
This project is important for the rail sector since it will contribute to improve the efficiency and attractiveness of rail transport by facilitating the flow of regular travellers and speeding up border crossing for regular travel saving time for these travellers. For this reason the UIC Security Division decided to attend the consortium to represent the interests of the railway companies within the organisation of the border controls at railway border points.
The main objectives of BODEGA’s project are to:
- Develop a round approach to incorporate ethical, societal and legal considerations into the set of human, organizational and technical factors to support the effectiveness of EU border control from different perspectives.
- Construct a greater understanding of border guard’s work and border control by adopting a long-term perspective and taking into account different end-users’ needs and requirements for future Smart Borders, e.g. border guards, border control authorities, and passengers (regular travellers).
- Gather new knowledge about psychological factors, which might affect border control efficiency and effectiveness at all border types: land (both road and rail), sea and air by performing in-depth human factors analysis.
- - Co-design and develop new guidelines, recommendations and specifications, based on refined understanding of the border control task allocation between human and machine.
- Develop and validate a toolbox with novel methods and methodologies: a set of practical tools for empowering border guards in their work for better EU border control efficiency, security and effectiveness, work-related well-being and job satisfaction, as well as improved decision-making by border control authorities, faster and positive border crossing experience of passengers.
- Border control is a complex and security-critical environment. To achieve its objectives, BODEGA will adopt an authentic co-design/multi-stakeholder approach to build new concepts, practices and structures for all types of borders in EU. BODEGA has built a multi-disciplinary consortium including experts in Human and Organisational Factors in complex systems and specialists in cognitive ergonomics, representative end-users and experts in smart borders systems engineering.
BODEGA has made the strong choice to include several important end-users, each of them being representative of the different types of border crossing which can be met in Europe: railway borders out of the Schengen area, maritime borders and their specificity in detection of goods, road borders and air borders in the Schengen area.
Within this framework, the role of the UIC Security Division will be to:
- represent the railways in the management of the constraints related to border control in order to reinforce the relationship between border guards and railway staff, facilitate the control operations for improving the efficiency of rail transport,
- implement railway field studies for defining concrete guidelines to be implemented,
- disseminate the results to the members in order to enable them to develop the right solutions at minimum cost and to have coherence between them.
