E-Navigation - Integrity in the maritime traffic system.

Abstract

Comprehensive and reliable situation recording and monitoring are basic prerequisites to avoid collisions and groundings in the maritime traffic system. Due to the technical advance in the last century both tasks are more and more overtaken by a variety of sensors, services and systems. As a result, a steadily increasing number of data is provided to describe the current situation on board the ships and in traffic areas. This opened the door for the application of integrated data processing techniques to perform the analysis of situation up to identification of threats at the soonest. But with the enlarging system complexity the necessity arises to evaluate the current usability of components and data in use to avoid misinterpretations of the situation. Usability evaluation becomes feasible in real time, if suitable integrity monitoring functions can be applied. In consequence, the implementation of system and data integrity into the maritime traffic system is considered as high-level user need of e-Navigation, a framework initiated by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to enhance the maritime traffic system. The article gives an overview about DLR’s project “Maritime Traffic Engineering” (2010-2014), which is pursued on the feasibility of integrity monitoring in the maritime position, navigation, and timing system (PNT) as well as during traffic situation assessment (TSA).