AI-ARC (H2020)


AI-ARC - Artificial Intelligence based Virtual Control Room for the Arctic – project aims to enhance safety and security within the Arctic and broader EU maritime areas. This will be achieved by developing a powerful platform. The VCR platform enhances the capabilities of practitioners such as coast guards, and is designed to be exploited by private operators as well. The project is a 30 months long funded project under the call SU-BES02-2020 of European Union’s Horizon 2020 with a total budget of about 6.889.792 M€.

The main objective of the AI-ARC proposal is to create an innovative, robust, efficient, and user-friendly artificial intelligence (AI) based prototype platform for coast and border guards, which allows traditional and VR-based interfaces to adapt to users’ preferences in terms of information management, anomaly detection, risk analyses and interoperability; in order to realize a comprehensive surveillance system that delivers powerful situational awareness for decision making, and safety for all maritime actors without increasing the command centres' workload.

For this purpose, real and AR components will be combined towards a new Mixed Reality based visualization layer development that we call the Virtual Control Room (VCR). This visualization layer will be underpinned by a set of interconnected software modules (suite of services) which revolve on big data and AI-techniques that will support ICT-based surveillance, enabling situational awareness in border management. We use the CISE approach to deliver VCR data also to National legacy systems in the EU. A web based solution provided by the VCR is globally accessible, the regular seafarer will have access to open awareness services and risk assessment tools for their own purposes.

SAMPAS will bring in AI-ARC its experience in the technical development and integration of the AI-ARC architecture and framework components for heterogeneous information sources, data fusion, big data collection and processing and also in the design and development of the visualization layer and information processing modules.

The project is carried out under the main coordination of Laurea University of Applied Sciences Finland, and consists of 22 partners from 12 different countries:

  1. Laurea University of Applied Sciences, Finland
  2. University of Turku, Finland
  3. Fraunhofer Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V., Germany
  4. European Organisation for Security, Belgium
  5. Ventura Associate France, France
  6. National Maritime College Ireland under Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland
  7. Maritime and Coastguard Agency, United Kingdom
  8. Icelandic Coastguard, Iceland
  9. Hellenberg International Oy, Finland
  10. Joint Rescue and Coordination Centre Norway, Norway
  11. Swedish Coast Guard, Sweden
  12. Tree Technology SA, Spain
  13. University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom
  14. Department of Defence – Irish Naval Service, Ireland
  15. Thales Alenia Space France, France
  16. SAMPAS, Turkey
  17. RISE Research Institutes of Sweden Ab, Sweden
  18. Telespazio France SAS, France
  19. Athanor Engineering, France
  20. European Union Satellite Center, Spain
  21. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
  22. Studio BDM Srl, Italy

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 770469.