Maritime awareness through data sharing in VTS systems

The main lesson learnt from the installation of widely distributed VTS integrated systems, is the mandatory need to select from all the information existing at all the levels of the system, the essential parts to be distributed. A lot of information is available, well beyond the traffic data, and must be taken into account. Examples are: Sensitive Water Areas, Meteo Bulletin, Sailing Warnings, Nautical News, Routine Regulations, AIS messages, Radar tracks, Satellite data (optical and radar Earth Observation, AIS, LRIT, VMS). External Systems´ integration is performed in order to enable VTMS operators to manipulate heterogeneous data as if they were local to the System. In the same way the relevant data generated internally are exported to remote External Systems with receiver-defined format characteristics and flow timing. The data flow can be conveniently based on web-services, on condition to protect the information by means of secure authentication mechanism, encapsulated into Transport Layer Security (TLS) tunnels to provide both data confidentiality and integrity. Additional advantage of this choice is that appropriate filters can be defined by system administrator for each connection (web-service or National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) 0183 standard). The whole networked architecture of the Integrated VTS Systems developed by SELEX - Sistemi Integrati, a Finmeccanica Company have been leaded from the installed systems toward an open framework compatible with the existing standards and therefore ready to exchange data with all the other standardized systems through the existing infrastructures.