Operational Activations of Maritime Surveillance Services within the Framework of MARISS, NEREIDS and SAGRES Projects
Margarit, Gerard
GMV Aerospace and Defence, S.A.U., SPAIN
European borders are facing new challenging security threats that demand enhanced surveillance systems. In the maritime domain, main drivers are the avoidance of loss of lives at sea, the increasing of safe and rescue measures, the enhancement of law verification and enforcement (for custom dealing and illegal immigration) and the provision of safer corridor lanes. The coverage of maritime European borders, especially at the Mediterranean Sea and West Africa coast, needs from Pan-European initiatives that involve more than one Member State (MS). Otherwise, the main goals would not be successfully fulfilled. In such initiatives, data fusion is essential as currently there is no sensing device that can provide ship location, tracking and identification information with a competitive spatial-temporal coverage. Main assets include ship / airborne surveillance, cooperative data streams (AIS, LRIT...), coastal remote sensing (Visible, IR, Thermic...) and Earth Observation (EO, SAR & Optic).
In this context, the European Commission (EC) and European Space Agency (ESA) have promoted R&D projects with the target to provide insights into a future system able to cope with maritime surveillance at European level in an integrated and efficient way. The system shall support and complement current operational practices, which are mainly conducted by short-range sensing devices plus local surveillance resources (ship and airborne). The scale is the key parameter as ideally the system should provide the same tracking and identification capabilities of local sensors at the scale of the whole European maritime border. From a technical point of view, key topics to solve are:
Examples of European initiatives are ESA's MARISS, EC's NEREIDS, DOLPHIN and SIMTISYS from the FP7 2010 space call, and EC's SAGRES and LOBOS from the FP7 2012 space call. The projects of the FP7 2010 security call PERSEUS, SEABILLA and I2C are also important, but they are more focused to the enhancement of current operational means.
GMV is involved in MARISS and is the Project Manager of NEREIDS and SAGRES:
In the current paper, the main outcomes of the three projects will be presented with special attention to the different campaigns and activations developed in each of them. The results / conclusions that can be derived from the joint exploitation of the different assets will be presented as well as specific technical improvements in key topics, for instance small ship detection. The results will show that MARISS, NEREIDS, SAGRES will permit progress in:
Indications about the technological configuration of the future maritime surveillance system will be also provided