Keeping our waterways safe by equipping commercial vessels with appropriate sensor suites to enable pervasive surveillance of coastal and inland waterborne commercial traffic

摘要

The US has over 58,000 miles of ocean shoreline, over 5500 hundred miles of Great Lakes shoreline, and over 3,500,000 miles of river and small lake shoreline. These waterways are critical to the nation's strategic, economic and societal well being. These assets must be protected from potential terrorist attacks. It is a daunting task for an open society to protect such a large and distributed area while still preserving the freedoms for its citizens to enjoy the natural beauty of our waterways.rnThe US has a well developed fleet of merchant tugs and barges that engage in day to day commercial activity around the coasts, rivers and lakes of the country. This paper will discuss the notion of developing a nationwide mobile sensor network by equipping these barges and tugs with sensor suites that would feed data into a common operations' center. The data will be displayed to the first responder community and the vessel operators via data streams from Rite-View (a robust 3D modeling and simulation tool).