Author: EXECUTIVE AGENCY “MARITIME ADMINISTRATION” (EAMA)
EFFECTOR project responds to the increasing needs of more advanced maritime surveillance, data interoperability, information exchange and reporting on local, national and international level, joint operation management on tactical and strategic level, to ensure maritime safety and security.
The combined use of EFFECTOR and CISE achieve the goals set and bring additional functionalities and improvements available for the users such as: Multi- level data fusion, abnormal behavior automatic detection, multi- layer data lake, huge source of information from sensors and data bases, fast reporting and information exchange between maritime administrations, mission management. The trials conducted in Portugal, France and Greece accomplish the developing process and embody the result of the mutual efforts of the EFFECTOR community, where all the capabilities and functionalities ware put into use together and the effect of EFFECTOR was well visible. The usage of all the components of the project together in large variety of use-cases in the trails outline and make prominent EFFECTOR’s benefits to the users.
The EFFECTOR project brings innovations in the communication, the surveillance systems including UAV capabilities, data storage, use and share, automated modules for decreeing work load and facilitating information exchange to next advanced level. At the same time the project provides solid foundation for future development and opens the way for further projects.
Author: Administration for Maritime Safety and Port Management of Montenegro (AMSPM)
As an end-user partner involved in the French Maritime Trial, the Administration for Maritime Safety and Port Management of Montenegro (AMSPM) contributed to the EFFECTOR project realization mostly exercising the tasks related to user and system requirements specification and analysis of operational scenarios for trials. In addition, the ASMPM provisioned data from its legacy maritime surveillance systems and assets for expanding the capacity of the French Data Lake.
From the end-user perspective, the AMSPM experienced significant benefits from participating in the project realization and the French Trial: including new data technologies, knowledge extension, and applying a maritime data sharing approach based on CISE and Big Data tools. While contributing to the execution of the initial steps of Scenario 1 – Integrated Maritime Surveillance, AMSPM provided the vessel safety reports and real AIS data for the Adriatic region. Also, through the implementation of all the trials, the end-users that participated in the defined scenarios had the opportunity to test the EFFECTOR system solution and the CISE interconnectivity.
This enabled training of their own capacities in the defined trials in order to be prepared for various real-time events at sea. Thus, during the interactions, the user community exchanged knowledge, technical capacities, and practical experiences in vessel surveillance, maritime traffic control, SAR and safety domain concluding with an overall positive appreciation of the highly developed EFFECTOR system for maritime authorities’ interoperability framework
Author: Hellenic Police
Given the fact that the national border authorities of the countries situated at the eastern external borders of the EU face significant challenges confronting illegal immigration and cross-border crime and the need to conduct search and rescue operations for persons in distress at sea, the need for timely, better and more effective maritime surveillance operations has arisen already. To that end, the innovative platform that the EFFECTOR project has created for the user community responds to the abovementioned needs, as it provides to its end users a significant improvement in maritime situational awareness by making better use of maritime surveillance systems and data sharing, which leads to faster detection of new events and better-informed decision making.
The implementation of an interoperability framework and the associated data fusion and analytics services for maritime surveillance, the implementation of multi-layered data lake platform, and the enhancement of operational efficiency and reduction of operational costs in multi-state operations, would definitely be included into the benefits that the national border authorities will come to enjoy by the use of the state of the art technology the EFFECTOR project has brought into the operational practice.
Those benefits would have never been observed and assessed if it were not for the trials that took place in France, Portugal and Greece, where capabilities and functionalities of the EFFECTOR platform were put into use against realistic and well prepared scenarios and the improvement of the operational practice in terms of information exchange, system interoperability, joint operational management and reporting was incontrovertible.
Meanwhile, the trials have provided with a robust baseline to build on, either by further developing the EFFECTOR system infrastructure or further enhance the individual functionalities and thus, the overall capacity of the system or even bring inspiration for future innovative relevant projects
Author: Hellenic Ministry of Defence (HMOD)
During the last few years, the increase of illegal activities on the northern and eastern borders of Greece, have led the Hellenic Armed Forces to be actively engaged in surveillance operations in the maritime and land borders. These operations can be extremely challenging, considering the complexity of the environment along with the large number of islands, and require utilization of a large number of resources on a daily basis. The fact that such resources are limited calls for the best possible utilization of surveillance data and efficient information sharing among local, regional, national and transnational authorities. Towards that end, HMOD has joined several research initiatives that set the path to the IMP vision: EUCISE2020, RANGER, MARISA and ANDROMEDA, and continuing on this road with the EFFECTOR project in 2020, in which HMOD is participating with the Hellenic Navy, as an End-User.
Through this process, the impact observed in our operational capabilities was significant, regarding the increased interoperability of the platform. Both at Cross-Border level, by sharing information with other fellow member states, as well as Cross-Sector, as we could obtain situational awareness by sharing data with the Hellenic Coast Guard or the Hellenic Police, or other competent sectorial entities from other countries. Furthermore, the Artificial Intelligence utilized by EFFECTOR, significantly supports decision-making, and reduces the resources that need to be assigned in order to obtain an enhanced situational picture for maritime surveillance. This is of great importance for HMOD because not only does it strengthen the dual use of its assets for the serving of national and European security but it also enhances the capabilities used and deployed in the defence domain as well.
