Regulatory

PREDICT - Predictive Risk Evaluation for Food Shipments
Client: U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

The FDA, along with other government agencies, has responsibility for inspecting food and medical imports. These imports have steadily increased with the emergence of global supply chains. Front-line inspectors at ports and border crossings remain the linchpin for the FDA's food and medical device surety efforts. With the increasing volume and complexity of food and medical imports, supplying these inspectors with automated, actionable information to use in their inspection decisions has become imperative.

PREDICT - an FDA system developed using NTEL·X's NXanalyzer application - is designed to help inspectors at border entry points identify high-risk shipments using an innovative blend of artificial intelligence using evolutionary rules for pattern discovery, an in-memory rules engine for better performance, open source intelligence, and expert rules. By improving both the effectiveness and efficiency of entry reviews and inspections, PREDICT helps the FDA deploy its limited resources to inspect FDA-regulated imports that pose the greatest potential risks. PREDICT can, for example, flag for inspectors a container carrying "fresh broccoli" that seems to weigh too little - an indication that it's either not fresh or not broccoli - or a food shipment that came from a part of the world affected by weather during its growing season which correlates with a higher-than-average risk for bacterial contamination.

Health Care

Health Care Solutions

The NTEL·X Health Care practice applies predictive analysis to help clients achieve dramatic performance improvements . Our solutions are focused in four areas:

• Revenue Life Cycle Performance - we help clients analyze health care claims to identify and correct errors. The result - reduced risk and liability associated with health care payments for hospitals and reduced costs for payers.

• Quality of Care Performance - the U.S. health care industry is moving toward a patient-centric, evidence and outcome-based approach to improve medical decisions. The result - improved quality of care and quality of life for patients while simultaneously reducing overall costs.

• CareManagement Performance - improved collection and analysis of patient treatment, testing and outcome data across time and across groups of patients enables better decisions for managing a patient's disease. The result - better patient outcomes while advancing best practices throughout the medical profession.

• Operations Management Performance - improve monitoring , allocation and management of scarce assets to improve service delivery, contribute to the overall quality of patient care, and enhance positive outcomes while minimizing cost. The result - enhanced care capacity, patient experience, staff satisfaction, and cost control.

Logistics Control

Truck Control System
Client: Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority (ASEZA), Jordan

As part of an ambitious economic modernization strategy, in 2005 Jordan began deregulating the trucking sector to improve performance. But the initial impact of these regulatory changes in Aqaba - Jordan's sole seaport and a primary logistics center - was disappointing. While the government had launched a far-reaching program to modernize and expand the ports, simultaneously attempting to create an attractive environment for tourist, commercial, and residential development -- trucks still waited in long lines, often for days, with ripple effects on service quality, port operations, pollution, and Aqaba's development. Jordan's Ministry of Transport and the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority (ASEZA) turned to NTEL·X to mitigate the problem and to design and develop a Truck Control System (TCS) to coordinate the movements of trucks through Aqaba.

The heart of the TCS is an intelligent transportation system, designed by NTEL·X and operating on NTEL·X's FDfolio™ logistics control platform, that minimizes the time trucks spend in the Zone. The design objective was to collect, validate, and share information to minimize waiting times and unnecessary trips, and get trucks quickly and smoothly through the ports and terminals. The system reduces congestion by monitoringcapacity utilization of roads and terminals and coordinates diversion and release of trucks to and from waiting areas and other locations including private terminals. Data interfaces to the Ministry of Transport, National Customs, and ASEZA Customs ensure that only trucks with valid business in the Zone are issued permits. The web applications themselves are highly intuitive and used by dispatchers, gate operators, and ASEZA administrators, many of whom are using such a computer system for the first time.

The impact of the TCS was immediate and dramatic. An independent evaluation during 2006 by Dr. Hani Mahmasani, William A. Patterson Distinguished Chair in Transportation at Northwestern University and past editor-in-chief of "Transportation Science", concluded that TCS delivered its core objective to cut turn times, thereby improving operational efficiency, taming congestion, encouraging trucking sector investment, and generating collateral benefits, including directly creating over 200 new jobs, reducing truck accidents on Aqaba's hilly roads, cutting pollution, and providing better planning data.

Now an indispensible tool for the Jordanian trade, transport, and logistics communities, these measures indicate that this unique intelligent transportation system is Jordan's largest e-Government system and likely the largest e-Government system in the transportation sector regionally. The TCS won the 2009 Intelligent Transportation Society-America award for the most innovative and effective use of advanced technologies in surface transportation.

Cargo Security

Global Trader
Client: U.S. Department of Defense

Every day, over 2 million commercial maritime containers move on ships carrying goods between the world's ports. The possibility that terrorists might smuggle weapons of mass destruction or conventional weapons and other contraband in these shipping containers presents not only immediate risks to national security, but also long-term risks associated with the proliferation of sensitive technologies. To identify potential threats as early as possible, the U.S. intelligence community needs to collect, process, and analyze enormous quantities of data about the world's containerized maritime shipments in order to identify and track high-interest shipments, activities, organizations, and individuals. NTEL·X was among the first to identify this threat and to define and support the information paradigm that now underlies our national and homeland security efforts in this area.

Global TRADER - one of our earliest solutions built around NTEL·X's FDfolio™ software suite - provides accurate and timely information about the movement of containers around the world. The system merges worldwide commercial maritime data with innovative and traditional civil maritime intelligence methods and capabilities to provide timely, actionable intelligence in support of National Security Policy objectives and the Global War on Terrorism.

FDfolio™ collects commercial maritime information from numerous disparate worldwide data sources, translates the data into an open-XML format, and loads it into a multi-terabyte Oracle data warehouse. Analysts access this information using sophisticated database reporting, link-analysis, and other cutting edge data mining tools. Peak processing can reach over one million transactions daily and has already processed in excess of 50 million transactions within one calendar year.

Freight Assessment System (FAS)
Client: Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Packages and other air cargo shipments not only move via dedicated air freight companies such as FedEx or UPS, but also travel aboard aircraft carrying passengers. To guard against the threat that terrorists might ship explosives or other dangerous materials on passenger aircraft, the Air Cargo Security Improvement Act calls for "systems to screen, inspect, or otherwise ensure the security of all cargo that is to be transported in passenger aircraft." Under the Act, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration is required to work with the airline industry to identify and inspect "at-risk" cargo shipments in a way that both addresses the threat and minimizes the cost, the operational burden, and the impact on processing times to the carriers, shippers, and consignees.

The Freight Assessment System (FAS) - a system built using NTEL·X's FDfolio™ application suite - was designed to meet the U.S. Government's need for accurate and efficient targeting and inspection of individual cargo shipments scheduled to travel aboard passenger aircraft using sophisticated risk profiling, scoring and assessment.

FDfolio™ interfaces directly with industry and government systems and also supports a dedicated web portal for smaller carriers and indirect air shippers to achieve this objective. Air shipment and other data are collected and submitted to FDfolio's risk-profiling and scoring engine where a TSA risk score is calculated. If the shipment is identified for inspection based upon the risk assessment, the corresponding cargo is physically inspected.

US Government Contracts
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