Overview

The general objective of the GAMBAS project is to support the deployment of Galileo exclusive features in the maritime domain, in order to improve:

• safety and security at sea;
• detection of illegal activities and associated surveillance means;
• resilience to natural and human-induced emergency situations;

and to develop, integrate, demonstrate, standardize and disseminate these new associated capabilities.

These existing or future Galileo specific features to benefit to the maritime domain are:

• SAR/Galileo (Forward Link and Return Link services), in its current and future design, including remote activation and other new Return Link services;
• Galileo E1 OS authentication service, currently under implementation;
• Galileo-based Emergency Warning Service, currently under evaluation for implementation.

The features presented above are specific to Galileo, or at least more advanced on Galileo than on other GNSS constellations, and they all can provide very significant improvements for the maritime domain safety, security, disaster resilience and environment protection, as presented in the list of project objectives.

Three new state-of-the-art products, with Galileo-based evolution shall be developed to support these objectives:

• A modernized anti-piracy SSAS beacon: even if some evolutions proposed below may apply to standard maritime beacons (called EPIRB), such as remote activation, the SSAS beacon is considered the most interesting as:
  • related to multiple innovations, in particular for the triggering criteria, and use of all capabilities of the return-link service, in particular the control of the transmission sequence, which is less necessary for EPIRB
  • MEOSAR system implements an independent location capability and is then not depending on GNSS signal reception availability, which is very important in security-related cases such as piracy.

• New information system integrating Galileo and all its new (multi-frequency) and on-going (authentication, distress position sharing, emergency warning service) features, considering two point of views:
  • the equipment of the rescue coordination centers and
  • the equipment of vessels at sea,

both the ones used for rescue operations and the general ones. In both cases, the challenge is to provide not only new solutions but also to integrate them in terms of HW, SW and operational use with the existing devices, to avoid to create an additional workload or inefficient management, considering the awareness and warning distribution as a whole.