Biblio

One of the main threats to the underwater communication cables identified in the recent years is possible tampering or damage by malicious actors. This paper proposes a solution with explanation abilities to detect and investigate this kind of threat within the evidence theory framework. The reasoning scheme implements the traditional “opportunity-capability-intent” threat model to assess a degree to which a given vessel may pose a threat. The scenario discussed considers a variety of possible pieces of information available from different sources. A source quality model is used to reason with the partially reliable sources and the impact of this meta-information on the overall assessment is illustrated. Examples of uncertain relationships between the relevant variables are modelled and the constructed model is used to investigate the probability of threat of four vessels of different types. One of these cases is discussed in more detail to demonstrate the explanation abilities. Explanations about inference are provided thanks to sensitivity spaces in which the impact of the different pieces of information on the reasoning are compared.

Firstly, this paper analyses the technical foundation of single sign-on solution of unified authentication platform, and analyses the advantages and disadvantages of each solution. Secondly, from the point of view of software engineering, such as function requirement, performance requirement, development mode, architecture scheme, technology development framework and system configuration environment of the unified authentication platform, the unified authentication platform is analyzed and designed, and the database design and system design framework of the system are put forward according to the system requirements. Thirdly, the idea and technology of unified authentication platform based on JA-SIG CAS are discussed, and the design and implementation of each module of unified authentication platform based on JA-SIG CAS are analyzed, which has been applied in ship cluster platform.

The past decade has seen a growing interest in underwater acoustic positioning networks (UAPNs) because of their wide applications in marine research, ocean monitoring, offshore exploration, and defense or homeland security. Efficient communication among all sensors and receivers is crucial so as to make positioning service available. Traditional UAPNs could locate only one target, that are growing obsolete due to increasing demands for multiple users working at the same time. Due to the demands for multiple users working simultaneously and narrow acoustic bandwidth, new efficient and reliable communication and networking protocols are required in design for UAPNs. In this paper, we aim to provide the procedure of communication design for UAPNs based on sonar equation and spread spectrum communication. What's more, signal design and performance analysis are supplied. The results show that the signal we designed have ideal correlation performance and high processing gain. The signal is suitable for multiple users UAPNs and thus show favorable potential in ocean engineering applications.

CISE stands for Common Information Sharing Environment and refers to an architecture and set of protocols, procedures and services for the exchange of data and information across Maritime Authorities of EU (European Union) Member States (MS's). In the context of enabling the implementation and adoption of CISE by different MS's, EU has funded a number of projects that enable the development of subsystems and adaptors intended to allow MS's to connect and make use of CISE. In this context, the Integrated Systems Laboratory (ISL) has led the development of the corresponding Hellenic and Cypriot CISE by developing a Control, Command & Information (C2I) system that unifies all partial maritime surveillance systems into one National Situational Picture Management (NSPM) system, and adaptors that allow the interconnection of the corresponding national legacy systems to CISE and the exchange of data, information and requests between the two MS's. Furthermore, a set of forensics tools that allow geospatial & time filtering and detection of anomalies, risk incidents, fake MMSIs, suspicious speed changes, collision paths, and gaps in AIS (Automatic Identification System), have been developed by combining motion models, AI, deep learning and fusion algorithms using data from different databases through CISE. This paper briefly discusses these developments within the EU CISE-2020, Hellenic CISE and CY-CISE projects and the benefits from the sharing of maritime data across CISE for both maritime surveillance and security. The prospect of using CISE for the creation of a considerably rich database that could be used for forensics analysis and detection of suspicious maritime traffic and maritime surveillance is discussed.

Over the last years, the maritime sector has seen an important increase in digital systems on board. Whether used for platform management, navigation, logistics or office tasks, a modern ship can be seen as a fully featured, complex and moving information system. Meanwhile, cyber threats on the sector are real and, for instance, the year 2018 has seen a number of harmful public ransomware attacks impacting shore and ashore assets. Gaining cyber situation recognition, comprehension and projection through Maritime Cyber Situational Awareness is therefore a challenging but essential task for the sector. However, its elaboration has to face a number of issues, such as the collect and fusion of real-time data coming from the ships and an efficient visualization and situation sharing across maritime actors. In this paper, we describe our current work and results for maritime cyber situational awareness elaboration. Even if its development is still going on, the first operational feedback is very encouraging.

The new generation ship integrated power system (IPS) realizes high level informatization for various physical equipments, and gradually develops to a cyber-physical system (CPS). The future trend is collecting ship big data to achieve data-driven intelligence for IPS. However, traditional relational data management framework becomes inefficient to handle the real-time data processing in ship integrated power cyber-physics system. In order to process the large-scale real-time data that collected from numerous sensors by field bus of IPS devices within acceptable latency, especially for handling the semi-structured and non-structured data. This paper proposes a novel key-value data model based real-time data management framework, which enables batch processing and distributed deployment to acquire time-efficiency as well as system scalable. We implement a real-time data management prototype system based on an open source in-memory key-value store. Finally, the evaluation results from the prototype verify the advantages of novel framework compared with traditional solution.

This paper presents netsim, a combined software/hardware system for performing realtime realistic operation of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with acoustic modem telemetry in a virtual ocean environment. The design of the system is flexible to the choice of physical link hardware, allowing for the system to be tested against existing and new modems. Additionally, the virtual ocean channel simulator is designed to perform in real time by coupling less frequent asynchronous queries to high-fidelity models of the ocean environment and acoustic propagation with frequent pertubation-based updates for the exact position of the simulated AUVs. The results demonstrate the performance of this system using the WHOI Micro-Modem 2 hardware in the virtual ocean environment of the Arctic Beaufort Sea around 73 degrees latitude. The acoustic environment in this area has changed dramatically in recent years due to the changing climate.

This paper has conducted a trial in establishing a systematic instrument for evaluating the performance of the marine information systems. Analytic Network Process (ANP) was introduced for determining the relative importance of a set of interdependent criteria concerned by the stakeholders (shipper/consignee, customer broker, forwarder, and container yard). Three major information platforms (MTNet, TradeVan, and Nice Shipping) in Taiwan were evaluated according to the criteria derived from ANP. Results show that the performance of marine information system can be divided into three constructs, namely: Safety and Technology (3 items), Service (3 items), and Charge (3 items). The Safety and Technology is the most important construct of marine information system evaluation, whereas Charger is the least important construct. This study give insights to improve the performance of the existing marine information systems and serve as the useful reference for the future freight information platform.

Port services and maritime supply chain processes depend upon complex interrelated ICT systems hosted in the ports' Critical Information Infrastructures (CIIs). Current research efforts for securing the dual nature (cyber-physical) of the ports and their supply chain partners are presented here.

Enhanced situational awareness is integral to risk management and response evaluation. Dynamic systems that incorporate both hard and soft data sources allow for comprehensive situational frameworks which can supplement physical models with conceptual notions of risk. The processing of widely available semi-structured textual data sources can produce soft information that is readily consumable by such a framework. In this paper, we augment the situational awareness capabilities of a recently proposed risk management framework (RMF) with the incorporation of soft data. We illustrate the beneficial role of the hard-soft data fusion in the characterization and evaluation of potential vessels in distress within Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) scenarios. Risk features pertaining to maritime vessels are defined a priori and then quantified in real time using both hard (e.g., Automatic Identification System, Douglas Sea Scale) as well as soft (e.g., historical records of worldwide maritime incidents) data sources. A risk-aware metric to quantify the effectiveness of the hard-soft fusion process is also proposed. Though illustrated with MDA scenarios, the proposed hard-soft fusion methodology within the RMF can be readily applied to other domains.