Improving Situation Awareness in the Maritime Domain

Organizations in the maritime safety and security domain have to cope with complex situations at sea, harbors, and rivers to maintain acceptable levels for safety and security. For safety, traffic rules apply at sea. Yet in areas with heavy traffic, it is difficult to tell which vessels adhere to traffic rules and which ones do not. For security, suspicious activities such as drugs smuggling need to be detected. In the past years it has become clear that there now are more means to detect vessels, because more vessels have equipment to broadcast their current position or are detected by sensor systems that are placed along the coast. At the same time, the rising problem is that it has become difficult to handle complex situations because of the amount of vessel movements in an area. In addition to the more complex view on vessel movement, more information on vessels is available in databases and on the Internet. To identify a vessel as suspect, information about the crew, cargo and owner can be used as a discriminator. Today’s maritime safety and security systems do not provide the mechanisms to handle the amount and diversity of information that is available. It is the task of operators to combine all information and elicit suspicious vessels. The risk is that operators have an information overload which causes them to miss important and relevant events, or to notice them too late. In this chapter we discuss several scenarios that indicate difficulties that maritime safety and security organizations face while building situation awareness.