At the conclusion of a year long international competition, the French DGA/Service des Programmes Navals has contracted Sofrelog for the second phase of the SPATIONAV project. The SPATIONAV V1 project was initiated by the French government in order to strengthen the surveillance of the French coastline.
The mission of the system is to further improve traffic safety, land security, monitor people and vessels, and the monitoring of illegal activities. Because of the involvement of several of the country agencies in such missions, the SPATIONAV programme involves a number of ministries: the Ministry of Defence (Navy), Ministry of Transport (Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres [MRCC’s]) and the Ministry of Finance (Customs).
SPATIONAV V1 is the second phase of the programme and comes after the completion of SPATIONAV V0 (2003-2004) for which Sofrelog integrated all of the 19 Mediterranean radars of the French Navy semaphores (signal stations). This completed phase has provided maritime domain awareness to the French Navy’s Toulon Operational Centre.
The just announced SPATIONAV V1 builds on the experience of the V0 phase and adds major operational and technical challenges including:
• Capturing the entirety of France’s metropolitan coasts as well as French overseas departments (French West Indies),
• Collecting AIS data transferred by vessels and providing nationwide coverage
• Integrating mobile units, both ships and aircrafts that will be included in the operational SPATIONAV V1 Real Time surveillance network
• Allowing a multi-ministry operational approach: The Navy for the Ministry of Defence, the MRCCs for the Ministry of Transport and the Customs for the Ministry of Finance
• Interfacing with other national and European systems and/or networks: Traffic 2000 and Safeseanet
• Covering the entire country, and thus a large number of sensors (70 radars, 44AIS base stations, optronics sensors, plus up to 30 mobile units), which will be connected in a global type network with more than 4,500 km of coast line
• Providing full maritime domain awareness of large and small vessels and providing high performance levels in terms of number and accuracy of objects to be followed in real time
• Emphasis is given to enabling the operators to perform their duties in the most effective manner by use of high level functions built for analysing and monitoring different kinds of special crisis situations: pollution, rescue, smuggling, terrorism, etc.
