D3.1 Maritime Use Case: Initial Requirements and Scenario Definitions

The present document describes the expert user requirements for the Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) use case of the INFORE project. To achieve MSA, which is defined as the capability of understanding events, circumstances and activities within and impacting the maritime environment [2], the user has to combine different data sources and perform data analysis tasks in order to derive new information, e.g., activities and events at sea. Using large-scale data fusion techniques and real-time analytics, we can also predict such events, as well as possible risks and threats and enable stakeholders to take actions to prevent them. 

Given these, this use case relies on the continuous/real-time fusion of heterogeneous data sources for specific areas of interest, combining global and local data, as shown in Figure 1. The term “global data” refers to Copernicus (Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery) and Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, while the term “local data” refers to in-situ data sensed by autonomous maritime vessels (mobile platforms) equipped with appropriate sensor devices. Exploiting the continuous/real-time fusion of input data for predicting/forecasting critical events of interest, facilitates proactive decision making, and ultimately improves Maritime Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. On the basis of the produced situational awareness, the mobile platforms will be able to autonomously adapt their navigation and sensor configurations to find a trade-off between area surveillance and the investigation of suspect targets. Sensor data fusion can support autonomous, real-time navigation decision making at the mobile platforms’ level, while an effective coordination of a network of mobile platforms has the potential to highly increase the prediction and interesting event classification accuracy. 

The use case will assess the robustness, performance, accuracy and usability of INFORE in real-world conditions. The aim of this document is to identify the kinds of conclusions that a user working in a maritime surveillance business scenario would like to draw from the INFORE prototype, and the results that must be provided from an analysis to aid drawing those conclusions. This document is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a brief introduction and Section 3 describes the pilot that will be employed in the scope of this use case in accordance with INFORE’s workplan. Section 4 contains the compiled output from the questionnaires that were completed by expert end-users during the interviews that were conducted to collect user feedback and specify requirements, defining the use cases. These use cases comprise essentially the functional requirements for the implementation of the Maritime Situational Awareness use case of the INFORE project and they are followed by the description of non-functional requirements. The non-functional requirements refer to the performance, reliability and, availability of the services rather than the software functionalities (features) that are outlined by the use cases. Section 5 contains more information regarding some of the domain-specific data formats that are used in some of the datasets mentioned by the expert users. The questionnaire that was distributed to the users is provided in Appendix A and the respective answers are provided in Appendix B.