The US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has published its Open Architecture (OA) Roadmap that defines its long-term strategy to enhance security screening capabilities.

According to the TSA, OA is a technology-design 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.

This approach increases the number of available partners who can supply improved technology quickly and at a lower cost.

Security screening development

“OA directly supports TSA’s mission and its workforce, while further protecting the nation’s transportation systems,” said TSA Administrator David Pekoske.

“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.”

The TSA’s OA Roadmap outlines four main goals:

• Engagement
• Technical standards and capabilities
• Organizational policies and procedures
• Data sharing

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