Building Up Operational Services to Support Intelligence Driven EUROSUR CONOPS High Time Critical Scenarios
Gomez Cid, Celestino; Margarit, Gerard
GMV, SPAIN

This paper details the techniques and technologies build up and adopted by different developments to tackle the scientific challenges that maritime border surveillance is currently facing on. Far from being circumvented into the scientific world, the need to find an operational solution different stakeholders have been working together to evolve the ideas up to the practical level and then to be deployed in the operational environment. Approaches have been conceived to provide an integrated vision of maritime policy and maritime surveillance by designing a system of systems capable to deal with heterogeneous maritime domains. The domains are illegal trafficking, illegal immigration, fisheries control, border surveillance and traffic monitoring. Further step has been given to maritime border surveillance to support the implementation of the EUROSUR program, aligned since the early developments to the principle: Awareness in the maritime domain requires monitoring the compliance of all activities, detecting with the help of surveillance and ship reporting system anomalies that may signal illegal (security threats) acts and generating intelligence that enables law enforcement authorities to stop unlawful entry into the EU areai''. The benefits for users are large as the same concepts and technologies can be used to carry diverse applications out (for instance, coastal monitoring, target tracking, buffer monitoringiK). Key scientific elements have been tackled first:

  • Define an open architecture simplifying the process of defining, implementing, testing new earth observation based capabilities for maritime surveillance. ICT analysis will be added in spite of assuring the proper security, reliability and resources of such type of system;
  • Investigate new SAR and optical satellite automatic processing capabilities. A particular emphasis will be placed on improving the reliability of detecting small vessels;
  • New collaborative and non-collaborative data fusion techniques with route tracking and reckoning;
  • Better understand of maritime operational activities by analysing maritime anomalies;
  • Exploit the enhanced capabilities (resolution, polarisation) of new sensors such as COSMO-Skymed, TerraSAR, and Radarsat2;
  • Advanced displaying results with 4D approach.

    To finally have in place enough capacities to address operational EUROSUR services. Current focus of the activities is:
    -the validation of the services pointed out by FRONTEX in the specification of Concept of Operations (CONOPS)
    -the development of a cost-effective analysis
    -the definition of the bases to deploy the fully-operational versions.
    The main outcomes of EO research are put together to support the operational deployment of the high-time critical CONOPS component through the EUROSUR network. As described in the proposal, the reference scenarios are:
    1.Tracking vessels on the high seas with two main components:
    a.Monitoring of a specific third country port.
    b.Tracking the identified vessel over high seas.
    2.Punctual monitoring of third-country port and coasts with one component:
    a.Monitoring of specific ports and stretches of third country coasts.
    The pre-operational services will be delivered to FRONTEX via EUSC and EMSA. The principle of use, comment, upgrade, usei'' applies, which will result in a cyclic development of five service versions during the timeline of the activities. The last one will base the design of the fully operational service that would be deployed in the period of 2014-2015. For such purpose, engineering tasks shall be applied to the cyclic feedback received from the user community so that the specifications are delivered at the end of current activities.