The whole world watched on the 13th of January 2012, as the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia was sinking in shallow waters by the rocky coast of Isola de Giglio, in what seemed to be an inexplicable – for modern times – naval disaster. With a death toll of 33 people and damage bill of $2 billion, this shocking event was entirely related to bad crisis response and management from the ship captain and crew.
Nine years later, the European R&D project ISOLA combines state-of-the-art technologies blended with novel solutions to enhance the situational awareness and support the assigned ship’s Security Officer and the crew to the execution of their duties, especially to the ship Security Plan. Because in times of crisis, technology can really make the difference.
For ISOLA, SIMAVI will develop an Augmented Reality application to assist the security officer on board the cruise ship. The Romanian software company will also deliver the mobile app that communicates to passengers on threat situations, in order to inform them about the safety plans. Moreover, with an extensive experience in more than a decade of eLearning projects for the European Commission, SIMAVI will develop a Virtual Reality app for training the crew members.
ISOLA delivers a systematic and fully automated security approach by incorporating innovative technologies for sensing, monitoring, data fusion, alarming and reporting in real-time during illegal incidents. This will ensure a high level of security among all the passengers of the ship and the augmentation of the Ship Security Plan.
Enhanced crisis management with AR
SIMAVI will participate in all stages of the ISOLA technical solution development, with its main focus on the Early Warning & Ship Crisis Assessment Algorithms for Decision Support. The algorithms are empowered with advance functionalities for visualization and crisis management.
First, the Augmented Reality (AR) based interfaces will offer improved situation awareness through the use of heads-up displays and gesture-based AR. The displays will enable on site crew members to see the most important information from command and control without having to return to a desk to access a screen.
The system will warn of potential impending crisis situations and assess the likelihood of such actions occurring. It will also offer possible resolutions and identify additional events that may occur as a knock-on effect.
There are mobile apps designed for the passengers, as a first
The mobiles apps developed by SIMAVI will support the passenger’s awareness in the ship, linking data from mobiles with sensor measurements. The apps will receive information on threat situations to inform passengers about the safety plans.
Security risk management modeling for enhanced preparedness
Security risk management is the process followed by an authority to deal with a major event that threatens to harm the organization itself, its stakeholders, or the general public.
ISOLA provides a three-step model, dividing crises into macrostages – precrises, crisis and postcrises. This algorithm will be applied in all cases, covering the vulnerability of ship systems from infrastructure attacks, chemical attacks, act of violence, thefts etc. It will also give the security team on board the ability to respond to the threats of ship-related security and safety by increasing the resilience of ship security and systems.
The main objectives of ISOLA are: to create methods for ships to easily integrate new solutions regarding passengers and crew safety in the existing ship systems; to propose innovative sensor and visual technologies to support security safety; to create a complex collaborative system for monitoring and detecting security incidents and events; to create early warning methods for the ship security crew to prevent security issues; to collect incident evidences by exploiting the Augmented Reality; to allow fast engagement between the different authorities in a ship related crisis; to model, classify and easily report a security event.
The ISOLA project started in September 2020 and is estimated to end in September 2023.
Technologies used in this project are: Android Studio, Unity, RabitMQ, SQL lite, Oculus SDK
The consortium
Coordinator: AIRBUS DEFENCE AND SPACE SAS, France
Partners: Software Imagination & Vision (SIMAVI), Romania; Inspectoratul Teritorial al Politiei de Frontiera Timisoara, Romania, ETHNIKO KENTRO EREVNAS KAI TECHNOLOGIKIS ANAPTYXIS (CERTH), Greece; Acceligence, Cyprus; ANONIMI NAFTILIAKI ETERIA KRITIS (ANEK), Greece; Aversa, Bulgaria; INSTITUT PO OTBRANA (BDI), Bulgaria; Celestyal Ship Management LTD, Cyprus; Sheffield Hallam University (Centric), United Kingdom; Cyberlens (CLS), Netherlands; Columbia Shipmanagement (CSM), Cyprus; Ministry of Defence (CY MOD), Cyprus; DROMON Bureau of Shipping LTD, Cyprus; Ecole Navale, France; IBM Israel - Science and Technology, Israel; IDEMIA IDENTITY & SECURITY France, IDEMIA IDENTITY & SECURITY Germany; OCEANSCAN - Marine Systems & Technology LDA (MST), Portugal; NATIONAL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS (NTUA), Greece; Prisma Electronics, Greece; Prometech, Netherlands; T4I ENGINEERING (T4i), Greece; ZEUS MARITIME SERVICES (ZEUS MS LTD), United Kingdom; Administration of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine (ASBGS), Ukraine.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 883302.
For more information:
Website: isola-project.eu
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