Design and Implementation of a Remote Update Tool for X-Ray Tutor

finisthed by Manuel Meyer in August 2007

This thesis is about the evaluation of an architecture and a design for an extension of the X-Ray Tutor Network Administration Tools. X-Ray Tutor is a learning tool for airport police officers who visually assess x-ray images of passenger baggage in order to identify threat items. X-Ray Tutor is used at many hundred airports worldwide and is the leading training solution in the field of x-ray image assessment training. An X-Ray Tutor Environment consists of a headquarter server, a site server for each airport and several Tutor workstations at each airport. The Tutor workstations communicate with the site servers and the site servers communicate with the headquarter server.

The goal of the thesis is to elaborate the architecture and design and to implement a program suite which can be used to create and remotely distribute image library updates to connected airports. Before this project took place, image library updates needed to be installed locally at every airport. Obviously, since airports are usually very far away from each other, a solution for remote updates is very desirable.

The focus during the development lay on the reliable transmission of packages, secure network connections and a design that allows easy extension for future modifications. Using state-of-the-art programming techniques and following object oriented paradigms the X-Ray Tutor Image Updater Program Suite solves the problem of the geographic distribution of the sites, which is inherent to airport locations.

Prof. Harald Gall

Dr. Adrian Schwaninger, Mathias Neukom, VicoReg, UZH