Theft scenarios completed with successful outcomes for ISOLA system 

The theft scenarios involves many specialised tools inside of the ISOLA system. The theft of the phones in this scenario was automatically brought to the attention of the ship’s Security Officer. The full chain of events were tested during the PUC and they passed each check. ISOLA system can offer ships with precious items with additional security features without burdening staff.

Major progress in demonstrating the tools performance

We are excited to announce the successful kickoff and subsequent implementation of Pilot 1 and Pilot 2, marking significant milestones in our project’s progression and yielding valuable insights for further development. Here is a photo of the dashboard for the Security Officer of the ship to monitor the events on the ship.

ISOLA Representation at the CLIA Innovation Expo

The CLIA Innovation Expo is attended by CERTH M4D/ITI representing the ISOLA project showing European cruises companies the innovations in ship security in ISOLA.

Merry Christmas from ISOLA to all!

This will be the final Christmas the ISOLA project is active. What an exciting three years it has been. We as a consortium have progressed in achieving the project goals. Best holiday wishes to all!

PUC 1 & 2 Technologies Deployed and Integrated On the Ship 

The ISOLA project partners recently gathered on the designated ship for the Pilot Use Cases (PUC) 1 & 2, dedicating a full day to integration and preparation activities. This meeting was a crucial step, allowing each partner to install and rigorously test their systems in a real-world setting. The day’s primary focus was on establishing and evaluating the communication links between the various services, a critical aspect for the overall success of the project.

Confronted with the unique challenges inherent to the maritime environment, the team displayed exceptional adaptability and problem-solving skills. They successfully navigated these difficulties, ensuring the seamless operation of all tools and systems in this specialized context. This collaborative effort yielded highly positive results, marking a significant milestone in the progress of the ISOLA project.

This successful integration and testing day not only demonstrated the technical viability of the project but also strengthened the collaboration between the partners. The achievements of this day have laid a solid foundation for the next stages of ISOLA, reinforcing the project’s potential to innovate in the field of maritime security. The team is now better prepared to face upcoming challenges and continue making substantial advancements in the project.

ISOLA Project was represented by the BES Cluster stand at RISE-SD 2023 

RISE-SD 2023 was organised by Satways and ISOLA project partners CERTH and BDI hosted in Rhodes. The ISOLA project shared project information at the BES Cluster from the Meticos project. This event was a great initiative to enhance European research and development projects by bringing technology partners, research institutes, policy makers & end-users together.

CERTH presented the ISOLA project at the PALAEMON workshop

The PALAEMON project aims to enhance the current evacuation systems on passenger ships by developing and introducing a Smart Evacuation Management approach through the combination of cutting edge IT and network technologies. The objective of this workshop is to inform policy-makers, researchers and industry stakeholders on the latest developments in the area of maritime safety and security, specifically on the technology-assisted emergency, incident and crowd management in the passenger ships sector. The workshop will identify critical technology needs and design principles for emerging intelligent evacuation management technologies. 

Goals & Objectives:

• Explain to the broader community the PALAEMON’s project main outcomes, and report on the projects’ objectives and achievements until now, and receive feedback
• Conversate with other EU projects in this area, and active researchers from abroad, to identify the challenges encountered in the maritime emergency systems, while drawing analogies from the design of evacuation management systems in large public infrastructures (airports etc)
• Present and highlight the role of ICT, smart situation-awareness, personalized emergency messaging and real time emergency guidance technologies, to the enhancement of mass evacuation management processes

The usefulness of ISOLA Pilot Use Cases for passenger shipping companies

ISOLA will develop, integrate, test, deploy, demonstrate and validate a systematic and fully automated security approach by incorporating innovative technologies for sensing, monitoring, data fusion, alarming and reporting real-time during illegal incidents.

The main objectives of ISOLA are:

• To create strategies and methods in order for a ship to easily integrate solutions regarding passengers and crew safety in the existing ship systems.
• To propose innovative sensor and visual technologies to support security and safety.
• To create a complex collaborative system for monitoring and detecting security incidents and events.
• To create early warning methods for the ship security crew to prevent security issues.
• To collect incident evidence by exploiting the Augmented Reality features.
• To allow easy engagement of different authorities in a ship related crisis.
• To model, classify and easily report a security event.

ANEK, as an end-user, participates in PUC1 – Intoxicated troubles & PUC2 – Detection of a theft incident at a vessel’s shops of a total of five Pilot Use Cases (PUCs). The company has provided information on the procedures currently being followed on its ships and has contributed in recognizing the operational requirements to set up the use cases. 

Based on our engagement in the project so far, it is evident to say that a company operating in passenger shipping can benefit the greatest through the use of ISOLA system since it significantly strengthens the company’s safety and security procedures in terms of:

• detection and identification of illegal action and suspicious behaviour of intoxicated people (under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs)
• detection and identification of theft incidents caused by passengers

Enhancing the prevention and/or effective management of potentially dangerous and harmful situations for the passengers, the crew and the ship itself. 

Real-time Crisis Classification in the ISOLA System

Security threats across the oceans of the world and to the coastal areas continue to expose people and property at risk, while piracy and armed robbery are considered some of the most hazardous threats. Every year numerous violent attacks result in injuries, loss of lives and psychological traumas, as in many cases pirates proceed to hostage-taking and kidnapping of seafarers. Furthermore, security threats such as hijacking of vessels for ransom, cargo/property theft or damage arise disruptions of maritime transport and trade flows and have a significant financial impact in maritime trade. Hence, the development of new methods is needed to enhance the security of the vessels and to reduce the risk of a successful attack. ISOLA aims at enhancing the security of passenger ships through the development of an intelligent and automated security superintendence system. The National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), as part of the ISOLA Consortium, is developing a smart tool that estimates the risk level, in real time, for potential security incidents and provides a real-time threat classification alert. The classification tool analyses the data gathered from the ship’s legacy systems and various sensors and modules installed on the ship as part of ISOLA. The core scientific principles of the tool are based on Bayesian probabilistic models. The tool is expected to effectively support the decision-making process in terms of the vigilance, surveillance, early threat detection and adequate situation evaluation, during this time-sensitive and extremely stressful circumstances and it is expected to minimize human error as well as the overall response time.

Crowd monitoring and abnormal behavior detection from visual content

As a concept, crowd monitoring is generally an umbrella term and it might include either individual human behavior analysis or extended to a group of people and estimating number of participants in a specific area. Intelligent crowd-monitoring solutions can actually supply a valuable aim to the usual measures for crowd monitoring by combining state-of-the-art computer vision techniques that excel in both processing speed and precision accuracy. The actual real-time dynamic reporting of the number of passengers or crew members present, as well as the reporting of abnormal actions they might undertake, can be expanded to a variety of scenarios in maritime environment that would otherwise necessitate a large number of people dedicated entirely to perform this monitoring activity. The application, for example, includes, but is not limited to, early reporting of stressful situations or recognizing scenarios when ship’s security personnel should intervene to prevent or save individuals.

For ISOLA, the crowd-monitoring tool developed by CERTH takes input from ship’s surveillance cameras or dedicated drones and calculates the actual number of gathered persons in critical areas. Furthermore, it provides information about certain individual or crowd activities, which are considered harmful under certain conditions. The visual content is analyzed in near-real time, in order to offer the system with a higher degree of conceptual information about numerous individuals’ abnormal behavior, in other words a crowd analysis framework. When a suspicious and violent event occurs, the crowd-monitoring tool will trigger an alert to the ISOLA system.