A Marine Information System for Environmental Monitoring: ARGO-MIS

Abstract

Sea shipping routes have become very crowded and this, coupled with an always increasing demand of oil based products, contributes to the increase in maritime traffic density, as a consequence pollution risks have increased. Therefore, it is important to have information systems capable of detecting and monitoring environmental endangering situations like oil spills at sea. In this paper, a Marine Information System, acting as an integrated and inter-operable monitoring tool is proposed and discussed. The discussion focuses on a system that is able to integrate different data acquired from various electronic sensors, and that is inter-operable among marine operators and ship traffic authorities. The available data on the system are all geo-referenced, and flows seamlessly through the system, where they are integrated in a consistent and usable manner. An important result of this integration is the capability to produce a collection of proactive services such as Decision Support ones, which can be used to improve the functionalities and facilities concerned in an intervention operation. Through the implementation of these services, we aim to demonstrate how an efficient environmental management system could benefit from being supported by a Marine Information System that can provide the dynamic links between different data, models and actors.

Environmental Decision Support Systems for Monitoring Small Scale Oil Spills: Existing Solutions, Best Practices and Current Challenges

“…Once the results from the buoy were received and collected by the MIS, the dynamic risk map was recomputed and a new updated risk value issued for the area being monitored. Once this action was taken, the new risk map could be analyzed, and decisions could be made regarding whether a further proactive action should be made (i.e., maybe querying some different available resources) or whether the end users in charge of the monitoring should be notified about the general situation, in order to take into consideration all available variables [50].…”

Optimal Rescue Ship Locations Using Image Processing and Clustering

“…Moroni et al [24] and Pieri et al [25] developed information systems for detecting and monitoring environmental endangering situations such as oil spills at sea. Risk maps can help in deploying rescue ships in the most hazardous areas, but efficient deployment should be considered with limited number of resources such as two and three.…”

Ballast Water Management in the Black Sea’s Ports

“…Taking into account the fact that there are exports in this way, maritime transport comes with associated risks that the ballast water presents. This should lead to the adoption of a ballast water treatment system and its rules, even in the Black Sea, thereby reducing the risks to this natural biosystem via the ballast water brought by shipping vessels [32].…”