Improving Situation Awareness in the Maritime Domain

Abstract

Maritime safety and security organizations are continuously searching for new means to improve their awareness on activities and movement of vessels in the area they are monitoring. Over the years, building awareness on an area, or on a situation has become labor intensive because of the growth in available information. This is due to the increased number of vessel movements in an area, and the growing amount of information that is available on vessels beside position data. Consequently, the complexity of decisions about what actions are needed to cope with an incident increases. Another issue is that governments put more pressure on maritime security and safety organizations to protect the economic interests of the country. The government expects maritime safety and security organizations to ensure a smooth operation at sea, and be able to handle incidents at sea adequately while the budget stays the same. Monitoring operations at sea is difficult without the help of systems that provide support in building situation awareness. Such maritime safety and security systems must give alerts when incidents happen, provide a historic overview on vessel movement, provide interaction to replay a situation, and give support in up-keeping the quality of data when a sensor or other system part fails.