The external borders of the EU have historically been under great pressure, subject to a variety of threats, which include irregular migration and trafficking of narcotics. Within this context, authorities in charge of border and maritime patrol are faced with different challenges that include the heterogeneity of the traffic that undertakes illegal activities in European waters, limitations in the ability to collect and share timely available data among institutional organizations, as well as a lack of assets by the relevant authorities to cover the wide maritime areas under their mandate. Although there has been an expressive investment done in the domain of surveillance technologies and tools, the intake by the competent authorities has been slow, due to lack of uniformity in the integration of such systems with existing surveillance infrastructures. In order to address these challenges, project COMPASS2020 aims to demonstrate the combined use and seamless coordination of manned and unmanned assets to achieve greater coverage, better quality of information and shorter response times in maritime surveillance operations. The proposed solution will be based on an innovative CONOPS that makes use of multiple aerial and underwater unmanned vehicles with improved capabilities, deployed from OPVs or from land, and will be supported by a central, multi-domain and interoperable Mission System (MS) that enables the operation of these platforms from both locations. UxVs may act as deported ship sensors, providing critical mission data to the MS that can then be exploited through dedicated services to be developed in the scope of the project (e.g. Data Fusion and Threat Risk Analysis). The major goal of COMPASS2020 is to demonstrate an operational solution to ensure long range and persistent surveillance, increasing the situational awareness of coast guards and maritime authorities, and, thus, increasing the cost-effectiveness, availability and reliability of the operations.

EFFECTOR aims to enhance maritime surveillance, improve decisions support, and foster collaboration of maritime stakeholders by implementing an Interoperability Framework and associated Data Fusion and Analytics services for Maritime Surveillance and Border Security that will allow faster detection of new events, better informed decision making, achievement of a joint understanding and undertaking of a situation across borders, allowing seamless cooperation between operating authorities and on-site intervention forces ensuring that all existing privacy and data protection rules are fully respected. Specifically, EFFECTOR will unlock the full capabilities of maritime surveillance systems and data sharing at tactical and strategic level by introducing applied solutions for enhanced border and external security, including the implementation of a multilayered data lake platform for end-to-end interoperability and data exploitation, the exchange of enhanced situational awareness pictures at different level with CISE and EUROSUR, the adoption of interoperability standards for exploiting data sources and systems currently underutilized in maritime environment and the demonstration of new concepts and tools for knowledge extraction, semantic representation, data fusion, analytics, and federated querying that can scale from local to regional and up to national and transnational level. The EFFECTOR solution will be tested, validated and demonstrated in real operational scenarios together with maritime authorities, End Users and practitioners in France, Portugal and Greece. The project will leverage on the developments, results and experience from current and previous research projects (EUCISE2020, MARISA, RANGER, PERSEUS, BLUEMASSMED), from National Procurement projects of CISE Nodes and Adaptors and on the CISE infrastructure of the End Users.

The project aims to unlock the full potential of CISE, by validating in a long period of time CISE-compatible command, control and coordination systems from several Coast and Border Agencies. At the same time it is envisaged to further enhance, validate and demonstrate CISE by extending its scope for land borders and adapting relevant C2 solutions and associated services. This will be accomplished by extending the CISE data model based on the use cases and requirements and adapting state-of-the-art command & control systems for full compliancy with the enhanced model and CISE message exchange patterns. The project architecture will follow a hybrid scheme in order to allow the usage of the End User CISE Nodes/Gateways and at the same time to allow the testing and validation of the extended data model. The project will leverage on the developments, results and experience of the consortium from current and previous research projects (PERSEUS, CloseEye, MARISA, RANGER), from National Procurement projects of CISE Nodes and Adaptors and on the CISE infrastructure of the End Users.

With the evolving threat of climate change and the consequences of industrial accidents to becoming more severe, there is an increasing need for First Responders to access reliable and agile information management systems that offer as higher Situational Awareness and better Common Operational Picture. To match with current trends, the RESPOND-A project aims at developing holistic and easy-to-use solutions for First Responders by bringing together the complementary strengths of its Investigators in 5G wireless communications, Augmented and Virtual Reality, autonomous robot and unmanned aerial vehicle coordination, intelligent wearable sensors and smart monitoring, geovisual analytics and immersive geospatial data analysis, passive and active localisation and tracking, and interactive multi-view 360o video streaming. The synergy of such cutting-edge technological advancements is likely to provide high-end and continuous flows of data, voice and video information to First Responders and their Command & Control Centres for predicting and assessing the various incidents readily and reliably, and saving lives more efficiently and effectively, while maximising the safeguarding of themselves, before, during and after disasters. To this end, RESPOND-A envisions at exercising First Responders for getting familiar with the project technological outcomes, and demonstrating their real-world performance and effectiveness in the classified training facilities of our Responder Partners under hydrometeorological, geophysical and technological disaster scenarios.

ePIcenter will create an interoperable cloud-based ecosystem of user-friendly extensible Artificial Intelligence-based logistics software solutions and supporting methodologies that will enable all players in global trade and international authorities to co-operate with ports, logistics companies and shippers, and to react in an agile way to volatile political and market changes and to major climate shifts impacting traditional freight routes. This will address the ever-increasing expectations of 21st century consumers for cheaper and more readily available goods and bring in Innovations in transport, such as hyperloops, autonomous/robotic systems (e.g. “T-pods”) and new last-mile solutions as well as technological initiatives such as blockchain, increased digitalisation, single windows, EGNOS positional precision and the Copernicus Earth Observation Programme. ePIcenter thus addresses MG-2-9-2019 of H2020 Mobility for Growth “InCo Flagship on Integrated multimodal, low-emission freight transport systems and logistics”, particularly in what refers to new logistics concepts, new disruptive technologies, new trade routes (including arctic routes and new Silk routes) and multimodal transfer zones. ePIcenter will speed up the path to a Physical Internet and will benefit peripheral regions and landlocked developing countries. ePIcenter will reduce fuel usage (and corresponding emissions) by 10-25%, lead to greater utilisation of greener modes of transport reducing long distance movements by trucks by 20-25% and ensure a smoother profile of arrivals at ports which will reduce congestion and waiting/turnaround times.