Lockheed Martin [LMT], which has been exploring and developing integrated solutions for Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) for over two years, has partnered with the shipping company Maersk to demonstrate the tracking of large vessels on the world’s oceans using existing technology already aboard container ships.

Called Neptune, the project has demonstrated that data routinely gathered by large ships using onboard sensors, namely Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponders and receivers, and surface tracking radar, can be sent over long distances, integrated at a fusion center, and then transmitted over the Internet for possible use by various stakeholders in the maritime domain.

So far Lockheed Martin and Maersk have teamed up using one Maersk vessel, the 50,000-ton, 958-foot Iowa container ship, which routinely makes a 45-day round trip from several ports long the East Coast of the United States, across the Atlantic Ocean into the Mediterranean Sea, through the Suez Canal and Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean. Neptune has been successfully demonstrated aboard the Iowa on two trips with a third underway. Three more Maersk vessels that transit different areas of the globe will become part of the demonstration in the first half of this year to see what information comes in.

Maersk is a division of Denmark’s AP Moller-Maersk Group.

For the demonstration Lockheed Martin added the ability to gather the AIS and radar information aboard the Iowa, process it, and then send it back over long distances via satellite to its fusion center in Eagan, Minn., Paul Thierry, senior program manager with the Customer Solutions unit of Lockheed Martin’s Maritime Systems and Sensors division, tells TR2. Maersk volunteered to be a part of the demonstration, which began last November. The project has also shown that the vessel tracking data can be acquired and distributed without affecting the Iowa’s operations, Thierry says.

“What we’re doing is taking advantage of what’s organic to the ship and not perturbating their operation at all,” Thierry says.

AIS equipment is used aboard large vessels for collision avoidance at sea. The systems consist of transponders, which give off a signal that contains information about the ship and its location, and receivers, which allow data and location of other nearby vessels to be displayed on a screen. However, the data on the transponders can be manipulated, allowing vessel operators to change things like the name and type of their ship.

During the demonstrations in at least one instance in the Mediterranean this behavior was picked up by the AIS receivers aboard the Iowa and transmitted back to the fusion center.

“This was an example of how at a ship level people control what AIS says and an example of if you don’t have a persistent sensing of that, you would never see that behavior,” Thierry says.

In addition to changing the information an AIS transponder puts out, a ship can also just turn off its transponder, making detection more difficult. That’s why large vessels also have surface track radar, which lets them see out to the horizon, or about 20 miles for what is nearby at sea.

Thierry says that one time when the Iowa was south of Crete heading toward Port Said in Egypt, its AIS equipment picked up two other vessels transmitting AIS data while the radar picked up another vessel that wasn’t using AIS.

For purposes of the demonstration, and to manage the satellite bandwidth, the sensor data on the Iowa was summarized every five minutes and sent back to Eagan every hour. Thierry says that during a voyage the Iowa would see 5,500 other ships and collect 50 million data sets. All that information allows the program to understand patterns of normal and abnormal behavior at sea, Thierry says. To share the data that is processed at the fusion center, Lockheed Martin publishes it on Google Earth so that the appropriate maritime stakeholders have access to it.

Beyond the addition of several more of Maersk’s ships to be part of Neptune and the additional data that will be collected due to the expansion of participating vessels, Thierry says that the next step is discussing with the Navy and other MDA stakeholders “about what kind of effectiveness does this data give to your MDA problem. Where does it make sense to go from here?”

A key feature of this experiment is the data is shareable, Thierry says.

The Navy and its federal partners are still in the process of developing requirements for MDA solutions. Thierry says Neptune is an example of an industry partnership, in this case Lockheed Martin and Maersk, helping the government to solve the MDA problem.