In italia la più grande rete continua di sorveglianza dei confini

[easyand]

In breve: entro il 2011 si completerà un progetto partito nel 1999 che porterà tutti i 7500km di coste italiane sotto il controllo di 90 radar costieri, telecamere a lungo raggio e sensori radio nella più grande rete continua di sorveglianza dei confini del mondo. Il sistema controllera fino a 5000 navi al giorno in un raggio di 40km dalla costa.



Italy Puts Coastline Under Guard
By tom kington
Published: 12 October 2009

ROME - Italy is moving ahead with a plan to keep tabs on every inch of its 7,500-kilometer coastline with an integrated chain of radars that its manufacturer claims will be the world's longest uninterrupted homeland security monitoring network.

The full complement of 90 radars making up Italy's Vessel Traffic Management System (VTMS) is expected to be up and running by 2011. The system will track about 5,000 vessels a day within a range of 25 miles of the country's coast, and it will feed all data to a central monitoring office here.

The system will not rely on radar alone. It will fuse radar data with radio identification signals and visual images from TV cameras to give operators a more reliable indication of the exact position and size of vessels.

"It is the biggest system of its kind in the world," said Alessandro Giomi, a senior marketing adviser at Selex Sistemi Integrati (SI), the unit of Italy's Finmeccanica group that supplies the system.

Profiting from its experience in setting up the VTMS in Italy, Selex SI also signed a 20 million euro ($29.5 million) contract with Yemen in January 2007 to build a VTMS network of 11 radars along its coast opposite Somalia.

When the network is fully functioning by the end of this year, the 24 miles of coastal waters the radars cover could serve as a safe transit corridor for vessels now risking the pirate-plagued waters between Yemen and Somalia, Finmeccanica CEO Pierfrancesco Guarguaglini has suggested.

In Italy, VTMS has been set up piece by piece since Finmeccanica signed up to start work in 1999 on a first tranche contract worth 77 million euros.

Initial coverage was focused on Italy's ports, as well as the southern region of Puglia, to help identify small, fast vessels arriving at the time from Albania that were ferrying illegal migrants to Italy, Giomi said.

A second tranche contract worth 213 million euros was signed in 2006, and work is underway to expand the network to full national coverage using 90 fixed radars plus three mobile radars as emergency gap-fillers or for special events, such as the NATO conference at Pratica di Mare in 2002.

Radar data is collated at 38 Coast Guard centers, where it is fused with information from vessel-borne Automatic Identification Systems (AIS).

In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the International Maritime Organization made it compulsory for vessels weighing more than 300 metric tons to use AIS, a VHF radio signal broadcast by vessels identifying their position, type and cargo.

"For those vessels which are too small to use AIS, or which do not want to use AIS, or which choose to broadcast misleading information, there is the radar," said Giomi, who added that the radar also picks up low-flying aircraft.

On top of that are TV images, which are processed to reveal the position and size of vessels. They will be integrated with radar and AIS data for the first time by year's end.

"We are also developing computer analysis of TV data, which will, for example, count the number of people on a dinghy to tell us if it's suspicious," Giomi said.

Once the data are fused in Selex's open-architecture system to obtain the most accurate picture possible of maritime traffic, the radar, AIS and TV data are sent to the command centers of one of Italy's 14 Coast Guard search-and-rescue regions. From there, the information is dispatched to a Ministry of Transport operations room here.

Further research is underway to integrate UAV-derived data with the system's data, particularly for anti-piracy efforts, an Italian industrial source said.

Meanwhile, Serbia awarded to a consortium led by Selex a 6.4 million euro contract in September to set up a system derived from the VTMS for the monitoring of vessel traffic on the Danube River.

Selex also offers land-border-monitoring systems. On Oct. 7, Libya awarded the company a 300 million euro contract to set up a system to monitor the country's long southern desert border.

The Yemen government, which required coverage of 450 kilometers of coastline, chose Selex's new solid-state Lyra radar for its VTMS, which Selex says is more reliable than nonsolid-state equivalents.

"Selex has long built its own radars for air traffic control and defense use, but until a year ago, [it] subcontracted for small radars for vessel traffic. Now that has changed with Lyra, and we hope Italy will eventually retrofit it," Giomi said.

Marina Grossi, the CEO of Selex SI, has said that Selex plans to set up production of the Lyra radar in the United States in partnership with DRS Technologies, the U.S. electronics firm that Finmeccanica purchased last year.

The Yemen network also contains a TV camera set up on the uninhabited island of Miyun off the nation's coast, said Stefano Gelli, a manager on the program. ■