Airport and Ground Handling Resource Management Systems

At present, fraud experts estimate that only one per cent of packages are security-checked. INFORM believes that the air freight industry should adopt fuzzy logic based profiling procedures, which have already proved their worth in the prevention of credit card fraud. At banks and credit institutes, software using fuzzy logic monitors 4,100 credit card transactions a second.

The software recognises suspicious transactions among the payment and cash movement patterns and is able to stop them. It is not a matter of simply identifying the actual fraud attempt, but also allowing as many genuine transactions as possible to go ahead unhindered.

"The same approach can be used for profiling air freight", explains Dr. Andreas Meyer, head of the Risk & Fraud division at INFORM. “From the combination of information such as origin, sender, address, addressee, specific place of posting, freight declaration, any previous movements the parcel has made;, software using fuzzy logic can identify suspicious items of freight at the time and point of registering the shipment electronically.”

Should the German government go ahead with its five point plan for air freight safety in the EU, allowing safety authorities to obtain electronic access to logistics companies data bases containing senders name, addressees and freight declarations, then it is only a matter of time before freight profiling software could be implemented all over the EU.

“It may also be conceivable for freight companies, in the same way as banks, to be recognised for their proactive approach to freight security by receiving international certification once they have installed such a profiling solution,” concludes Meyer.

About fuzzy logic
Fuzzy logic (or the fuzzy set theory) imitates the human method of making models, concluding and communicating. In doing this a person rarely uses concepts that are simply true or false. Whether someone is “big” depends first and foremost on the context and secondly, there are many more “in-between sizes” between big and small, ranging from “quite small” to “of average size” to “almost big”. Upon analysing complex situations and considering many different alternatives, for instance, in the risk assessment of credit card payments or the profiling of air freight, fuzzy logic comes to demonstrably better decisions than when turning to classic methods based on two-valued logic. Right up to this very moment, INFORM has been constantly developing fuzzy logic algorithms and adapting them for use in each particular area.

About INFORM Risk & Fraud
INFORM develops and markets software systems to optimise business processes on the basis of operations research and fuzzy logic. INFORM software takes its own intelligent decisions in real-time in the fields of fraud prevention for the credit, telecommunication and insurance business as well as in transport and intra-logistics, in airport resource management, in production planning, sales planning and material management. INFORM's GroundStar system, used by over 50 organizations in more than 200 airports worldwide, is standard software solutions to improve airport and ground handling operations.

INFORM GmbH
Pascalstr. 35, 52076 Aachen, Germany

Phone: +49 (0) 2408 9456-3024
Fax: +49 (0) 2408 9456-3025
Web: www.groundstar.aero

Requests: Julia Hildesheim
E-Mail: airport.systems@inform-ac.com