Surveillance Technology can help identify hostile vessels.

• Position: Maritime Security

* CHERRY HILL, N.J.--Teams of sailors at the maritime security operations center in Italy monitor ship traffic plying the Mediterranean Sea searching for water-craft that are acting suspiciously. But discerning the potentially hostile ship amongst the tens of thousands of benign vessel tracks can be a difficult, time-consuming process.

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A Web-based software program under development aims to make the task easier by giving watch teams the tools to automatically monitor, track and analyze pertinent events occurring in the world's oceans and waterways. "It's useful for turning that mountain of data into actionable information quickly," said Rich Dickinson, program manager for the maritime agent analysis toolset at Lockheed Martin Corp.'s Advanced Technology Laboratories.

The software allows the teams to set up and activate "agents" that can help sailors hunt down specific information culled from a variety of military and commercial databases. The commercial databases include the automatic identification system live, a Surrey, United Kingdom-based global network that disseminates the real time transponder signals that are transmitted by ships.

The maritime agent analysis toolset has a number of preprogrammed templates that operators can configure to help them zero in on ships that are behaving suspiciously. Templates such as abnormal vessel speeds, vessel or geographic proximity, characteristic change, and direction of move ment will launch an "agent" that will search for violators within those specified parameters. If it gets a hit, the software lists the ship. Operators can then click on the list to see more details about the vessel.

"The agents are your eyes and ears," Dickinson said. "They're watching for the various conditions."

Sailors can pull up the ships on a Google Earth display to see where they are located and where they have been and where they are heading. The software was derived from an earlier Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project.

In a demonstration, Dickinson logs onto MAAT and pulls up the Google Earth representation. He zooms in until it shows the nearby Delaware River and a number of green, yellow, and red icons, each representing different vessels that are color-coded by how recently they have reported to the AIS system. Green icons have reported within the last hour, yellow icons have transmitted within the past two to 24 hours, and red icons are those that have not signaled for more than...