FedSS: FEDERATED SECURITY SHIELD
Societies around the Baltic Sea, North Sea and Mediterranean Sea face serious maritime problems due to increasing vessel traffic. Especially maritime transport (e.g. transport of oil & chemicals), increasing activities in the 350 nautical mile wide exclusive economic zone (e.g. fishing, oil drilling, wind mills & pipeline laying) and illegal activities (e.g. smuggling, illegal immigration and presence of terrorists) are causes. These before mentioned examples are labelled as maritime safety and security problems. Societies have the need and higher demand to preserve safety and security and to quickly respond to possible incidents. In Europe those incidents often affect multiple countries and societies. Therefore international co-operation is essential in order resolve these problems. Agencies involved are: coastguard, customs, maritime police, border police or immigration office, fishery inspectorate, Ministry of Infrastructure and the Ministry of the Environment.
Currently information and even invaluable intelligence from various third party sources is potentially available. FedSS aims at accessing and incorporating this tremendous amount of structured and unstructured data into security management systems. A security management system consists of components such as information & intelligence gathering, analysis and tailored visualization to the user. A typical example is the enrichment of the security surveillance picture with information displayed in stacked overlays. A security surveillance picture provides awareness of the organization’s area of responsibility and consists of maps, sensor data, time and information overlays. FedSS does not focus on sensor data fusion, instead it is focussed on rich information fusion. Rich information is not only text but also multimedia like audio, video and imagery. Furthermore, FedSS intends to enable effective international and inter-agency co-operation by taking into account national security, organisational and privacy regulations.
Objective
The main goal of FedSS is to provide all partners with a new information handling capability disclosing data sources on a secure need-to-share basis which utilizes semantic information techniques instead of syntactic protocols and where the information handling capability is visualized via rich internet applications (RIA) on tablets.
FedSS is a software-intensive system concept in the maritime security and safety application domain delivering federated software component/plug-in prototypes and service prototypes on an international distributed execution platform. This enables interoperability amongst new and existing geographically dispersed heterogeneous security solutions. Its visualisation is not only realized via desktop computers but also uses user-friendly touch screen technology as present in smartphones and tablets. Especially tablets will replace desktops and laptops in the near future and tablets will enable mobile teams to get immediate access to tailored information essential for effective operations. FedSS intends to make use of state-of-art, easy scalable Rich Internet Applications (RIA) technology and intends to apply ontologies, semantic analysis, anomaly detection technologies and emerging software development technologies.
According to external studies the relative European market size for this maritime safety and security environment is estimated between €1.5 bn and €2.5 bn and it is estimated world-wide at €6.7 bn. The security market is expected to grow worldwide at least around 5% annually; where the fastest growing regions are located in Asia and in the Middle East.
With respect to business relevance, the system integrator partners expect more turn-over by selling either augmentation of new information handling capabilities to existing systems or as part of new systems. For the small niche players, FedSS will provide them a more easy access to the maritime security market.
Summarizing, FedSS will deliver demonstration systems with a new information handling capability for utilising huge amount of accessible information in order to execute their operations more effectively.
Funding organization: CDTI (Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico e Industrial), Programa de Proyectos Internacionales de Cooperación Tecnológica. (Ref.: IDI20130310).
Programme: ITEA 2 (Information Technology for European Advancement), Call 6. (Ref.: E! C11009)
Period: 1 December 2013 – 30 September 2016
Partners: C2Tech (TR), CTIC (NL), TUe (NL), Luciad (BE), Proline (TR), Skytec (IE),Thales(NL),Yaltes (TR), Daedalus (now MeaningCloud) (ES)
Budget: 12.8 M-€ / M-€ funding
Coordinator: Thales
