Maritime surveillance is a complex and multifaceted challenge, involving vast and remote areas, diverse maritime activities, and a wide range of potential threats—from illegal fishing and smuggling to environmental hazards and border security. The EU co-funded research project I-SEAMORE advances maritime surveillance by developing cutting-edge technologies such as AI-driven data fusion, autonomous monitoring systems, and enhanced sensor integration to improve situational awareness at sea. These innovations aim to support more efficient detection of illegal activities and environmental threats. One of the technical outcomes developed within I-SEAMORE is the ability to interactively and virtually define and evaluate new concepts of operations (ConOps) before implementing them in real world scenarios.
Leveraging the recently awarded Crimson platform, which received the European Commission Security Innovation Award 2025 for its significant impact on the security of the European Union, the technological partner CS-GROUP developed a suite of tools based on digital twinning, modelling and simulation -called M&S- tools to enable the interactive creation, visualization, analysis and evaluate ConOps. These tools help decision-makers assess the feasibility and effectiveness of different strategies under various conditions, including potential threats and environmental factors. M&S also supports collaborative planning by providing a shared framework for stakeholders to explore “what-if” scenarios and refine tactics.
The main benefits of the M&S framework include:
- Interoperability: Based on maritime domain reference standards (S-57 maps, AIS, CISE) and simulation standards (DIS), the framework ensures seamless integration with external interfaces. This enhances overall system interoperability and allows the framework to simulate all levels of data and messages.
- Realistic Simulation: The framework provides a realistic simulation environment, enabling accurate representation of maritime surveillance scenarios, including 3D video streaming from virtual drones and surveillance cameras. This ensures effective evaluation and testing of ConOps.
- No-Code Approach: The creation tool’s no-code approach ensures accessibility for users without programming knowledge, allowing them to create and modify scenarios intuitively and efficiently.
During the project, the M&S framework played crucial roles in several instances:
- Use Case Definition: The framework was used as a visual, dynamic, and user-friendly tool to define realistic scenarios, with advanced positioning and dynamic modelling of assets. It helped end users identify the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the project’s use cases.
- Integration: Its wide interoperability capabilities enabled technological partners to test their components in a realistic setting, using simulated inputs and outputs for unitary testing or progressive system testing.
- Demonstration: The M&S framework provided a visual and dynamic briefing to all stakeholders, allowing them to prepare for the coming operation and easily assess and understand the pilot scenarios.
