US Customs Service

IAI provided long-term quality assurance and independent verification and validation support to four divisions within the U.S. Custom Service's Office of Technology Assessment. IAI provided systems security specialists to develop disaster recovery procedures and an application system software life-cycle methodology; designed and configured secure workstation and LAN platforms; and provided quality assurance and training services to support the development and maintenance of a state-of-the-art data collection and retrieval system used by U.S. Customs law enforcement.

IAI has supported the Customs Services' Automated Targeting System (ATS) since its inception in 1994. ATS is an artificial intelligence system that evaluates cargo shipments to assist Customs officials in locating those shipments that pose a threat for narcotics, terrorism, unsafe hazardous materials or improper duty declaration. The system obtains information about every import and export processed by Customs' legacy systems, evaluates them using a series of AI techniques, and distributes the data to users in support of cargo processing. ATS is three-tier client-server system, using Oracle at the two database tiers. Complete transaction history is maintained on the national server, and a subset of transactions of particular interest to the user community is duplicated on the server at the local site. IAI personnel have developed the process on the legacy MVS mainframe that obtains copies of all transaction data; this task is written in COBOL and assembler. IAI has also developed the three-tier architecture using open-systems platforms (AIX and Solaris), including the C/C++/Pro*C software that maintains the database and the software that coordinates data distribution among user sites via TCP/IP.

IAI is supporting a large data warehousing system based on SQL Server with a Visual Basic interface. Information regarding Customs Transactions is received from the service's mainframe system, and analysis is performed on the transactions in a client/server environment. The software being developed by IAI processes the raw data received from each account (importer/exporter), tracks errors and enables Customs to improve the accuracy of data supplied by the import/export community.

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