ARESIBO aims at improving the efficiency of the border surveillance systems by providing the operational teams and the tactical command and control level with an accurate and comprehensive information. The pillars of research in ARESIBO are three-fold: 1. Set-up a complete configuration at tactical and execution level to optimise the collaboration between human and sensors (fixed and mobile), 2. Improve situation awareness by enhancing the understanding of the situation through adapted processing of sensor data, correlation between heterogeneous data and information and creation of knowledge through deep learning techniques and 3. Create a situation awareness capability at C2 level that will combine reports on previous missions, real time situation understanding and threat analysis for future actions. This capability will be used to optimise the operations (teams deployment and sensor positioning) as well as an online briefing tool for the teams that will be able to access to the results of the previous missions while in the field. ARESIBO integrates research activities in the domain of 1. surveillance platforms (air, ground, surface, underwater) to optimise the collaborative capabilities of the platforms and their positioning (between themselves and with the teams), 2. Sensor processing to interpret, fuse and correlate all the data to produce information and knowledge and 3. Augmented reality techniques to elaborate and provide to the operators a situation awareness picture which is fit for their missions (minimum information for maximal understanding) both as team level and tactical C2 level. The ARESIBO system will be developed incrementally during the 3 years with two major versions that will lead to sub-versions for land and maritime borders. The system will be tested and assessed in 1. a controlled environment enabling testing at any time without pre-requisite authorisations and 2. in real conditions in Finland, Greece, Romania and Portugal for the 2 versions.

The creation of the Schengen area has been one of the major achievements of the EU. However, this agreement requires countries to cooperate tightly in order to keep a high level of security at their internal borders, as well as to share the responsibility of managing external borders. Such a variety of borders (land, sea and air) and current challenges requires a consistent approach to border surveillance, based on a plethora of heterogeneous assets. These can be manned or unmanned, ranging from sensors (optical, radar, IR) to unmanned platforms (UAV, UGV, USV or UUV), and need to be combined to offer an integrated situational picture of the area under surveillance and of their location. In order to effectively control their operation and manage the large amounts of data collected by them, new approaches for command and control need to be considered, allowing efficient interaction between the operator and the different assets in the field. CAMELOT proposes to develop and demonstrate different advanced command and control service modules for multiple platform domains, based on a SOA architecture that specifies internal and external interfaces, allowing the development of a modular and scalable command and control station, customisable to the user needs. This architecture can be based on results of previous studies and work or open architectures that may prove more suitable and the interfaces can take advantage of the standardisation work that has been done already. After the definition, CAMELOT partners will prototype service modules according to their expertise, background individual technologies and practitioner needs. These will be integrated progressively in specific testing along the project. This prototype development approach will culminate in 2 final demonstrations involving end users and relevant stakeholders, to achieve a maturity of TRL6 (for most individual technologies supporting the functionalities for border surveillance) and an IRL of 7 for CAMELOT.

The Mediterranean and Black Sea region is characterised by a very volatile and dynamically changing security environment that pose severe threats and challenges on the societies and prosperity. The MEDEA project, during its 66 months of implementation provides funding for four interrelated actions: (i) Establish and Operate the MEDEA network, a multi-disciplinary network of security practitioners, with active links to policy makers and users/providers of security innovations across the M&BS countries focusing in Border Protection and other Security- and Disaster-Related tasks. During the project duration, MEDEA members will engage in activities towards maintaining its sustainability and longevity after the financing of this project ends, (ii) Engage participants in anticipatory governance on emerging security challenges that the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions would face in the coming years (present until +10 years), which concretely operationalizes the backbone of the project in a triple structure: a) understanding unsatisfactory state of play, b) design the desirable future and c) define a resilient pathway on how to achieve this, (iii) Push for the “co-creation” of security technology and capabilities innovations between practitioners and innovation suppliers, which is based upon their evaluation and prioritization on multi-criteria analysis (technology, operational and cost-benefit, etc.) and also linked to Human Development, Policy Making and Organizational Improvements in-terms of facilitating its use by the practitioners (iv) Establish and annually update the Mediterranean Security Research and Innovation Agenda (MSRIA), that identifies areas where security & defence research is needed and the establishment of recommendations for European Security & Defence technology investments.

Combating irregular migration, human smuggling, terrorism at sea, piracy, as well as arms and drug trafficking has become a high priority on Europe’s security agenda. Securing the sea requires a day-to-day collaboration activities among European actors of maritime surveillance, Member States’ administrations and European agencies principally, and a significant number of initiatives are being taken at EU level to address this challenge. The large amount of ‘raw data’ available today are not usable by systems supporting maritime security since they are not accessible at the same time and, often, they are not interoperable. Therefore, the overarching goal of MARISA project is to provide the security communities operating at sea with a data fusion toolkit, which makes available a suite of methods, techniques and modules to correlate and fuse various heterogeneous and homogeneous data and information from different sources, including Internet and social networks, with the aim to improve information exchange, situational awareness, decision-making and reaction capabilities. The proposed solution will provide mechanisms to get insights from any big data source, perform analysis of a variety of data based on geographical and spatial representation, use techniques to search for typical and new patterns that identify possible connections between events, explore predictive analysis models to represent the effect of relationships of observed object at sea. Enterprise and ad-hoc reporting and services, within the CISE context, will be provided to support users and operational systems in their daily activities, as well as presentation tools for navigating and visualizing results of data fusion processing. The involvement of 5 practitioners as full partners will allow on the one hand to align innovation to user needs, on the other hand to validate the toolkit through a number of trials addressing cross country/cross domain applications.