METIS: An Integrated Reconfigurable System for Maritime Situational Awareness

Nowadays the maritime operational picture is characterised by a growing number of entities whose interactions and activities are constantly changing. To provide timely support in this dynamic environment, automated systems need to be equipped with tools— lacking in existing systems—for real-time prioritisation of the application tasks (missions), selection and alignment of relevant information, and efficient reasoning at a situation level. In this paper, we present METIS—an industrial prototype system for supporting real-time, actionable maritime situational awareness. In particular, we focus on the innovation of METIS, which lies in the employment and integration of several state-of-the-art AI technologies to build the overall system’s intelligence. These include reconfiguration of multi-context systems, natural language processing of heterogeneous (un)structured data and probabilistic reasoning of uncertain information. The capabilities of the system have been demonstrated in a proof of concept, which is deployed as a situational awareness plugin in the Tacticos command-and-control platform of our industrial partner. The principles exploited by METIS are giving valuable insights into what is considered to become the next generation of situational awareness systems.