Reference architecture of technological demonstrators for enhanced maritime situational awareness

In multinational defence operations, either EU or NATO driven, the exchange of surveillance and reconnaissance data and information is an essential aspect to provide to the commander the needed situational awareness. This improvement of situational awareness, especially in a maritime environment, may be achieved amongst others by extending the ISTAR performance through using unmanned systems (UxS) and integrating them into the combat management system (CMS),ensuring interoperability between the deployed forces and building the overall system based on a solid architecture. Within this frame, the OCEAN2020 (Open Cooperation for European mAritime awareNess) project, funded by the European Union's Preparatory Action on Defence Research and implemented by the European Defence Agency, sees 42partners from 15 EU countries working together to build future maritime surveillance by integrating drones, unmanned vessels and unmanned submarines into fleet operations. Data and information will be integrated in a comprehensive(maritime) picture of developing situations, enhancing the situational awareness, and thus supporting military commanders on different unit levels in their decision making. This paper focuses on the challenge to define flexible architectures for maritime operations. The reference architecture for a system-of-systems that aims to provide enhanced situational awareness in a naval environment will be presented. The reference architecture provides reusable structures and rules, helping to reduce development and system realization time and costs. This Reference Architecture will establish strategic decisions regarding system technologies to be usedand will serve as baseline for the development of two Target Architectures for the two planned demonstrations.