Current Military/Defense use for AIS

[Captains Cat]

SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY CAN HELP IDENTIFY HOSTILE VESSELS: Teams of sailors at the maritime security operations center in Italy monitor ship traffic plying the Mediterranean Sea searching for watercraft that are acting suspiciously. But discerning the potentially hostile ship amongst the tens of thousands of benign vessel tracks can be a difficult, time-consuming process. A Web-based software program under development aims to make the task easier by giving watch teams the tools to automatically monitor, track and analyze pertinent events occurring in the world's oceans and waterways. "It's useful for turning that mountain of data into actionable information quickly," said Rich Dickinson, program manager for the maritime agent analysis toolset at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories.

The software allows the teams to set up and activate "agents" that can help sailors hunt down specific information culled from a variety of military and commercial databases. The maritime agent analysis toolset has a number of preprogrammed templates that operators can configure to help them zero in on ships that are behaving suspiciously. Templates such as abnormal vessel speeds, vessel or geographic proximity, characteristic change, and direction of movement will launch an "agent" that will search for violators within those specified parameters. If it gets a hit, the software lists the ship. "The agents are your eyes and ears," Dickinson said. "They're watching for the various conditions."

Sailors can pull up the ships on a Google Earth display to see where they are located and where they have been and where they are heading. The software was derived from an earlier Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project. In a demonstration, Dickinson pulls up the Google Earth representation. He zooms in until it shows the nearby Delaware River and a number of green, yellow, and red icons, each representing different vessels that are color-coded by how recently they have reported to the AIS system. Green icons have reported within the last hour, yellow icons have transmitted within the past two to 24 hours, and red icons are those that have not signaled for more than 24 hours.

Dickinson clicks on a vessel that he had begun tracking a few hours earlier. It is sitting at the mouth of the Delaware waiting for the pilot to come and take it up river. A quick click makes the system show the previous 250 positions for the ship. It lays down the track and an operator can see where the ship has sailed from. He clicks out of the Google Earth visualization and over to a menu with active agents. He pulls up one that was set up to monitor ships moving slowly near the airport. In the course of an hour, the agent has tallied 26 hits. (National Defense, 4/2010)

Cool!

Charlie

[hardee]

Great one, but how many Somali pirate boats are running AIS? Or how about a stolen cabin cruiser with a bow full of C4, think that one has an active AIS on board? Maybe not.

I still think that it is a good tool.

In that application maybe they should be looking at what has AIS output and what doesn't. (IMHO)

Harvey
SleepyC

[thataway]

An article in the Wall Street Journal noted that a large percent of the Iranian ships had been re-named--as had their shipping companies. Plus it is not just the ship--but the container in that ship which may have come from some inland point, containing dangeours or contraband cargo. AIS may help some--but those who want to act outside of the law, shall continue to do so, and AIS or tracking will not help us much in those cases. We have had the capability to track ships (at least under clear sky areas) for many years via satellite photography. I see AIS as more collision avoidance than military operation or security.