Environmental Distress Demonstrator

The Coast Guard Centre and the Royal Dutch Rescue Organisation (KNRM) are responsible for providing assistance in emergency situations at sea, for instance when ships are in distress, containers fall overboard or with problems relating to pollution (such as oil spills). West developed an innovative pilot application, in cooperation with Ursa Minor and ARGOSS, based on real-time satellite data that shows the location of an object at sea and where this object will most probably be located at a later time.

Market: Search and Rescue (SAR)
Technology: WFS, WMS, WSDL, SOAP, NetCDF, MapBuilder, AJAX, Java, Perl
Brochure: Link to a PDF project brochure

Background

Help organisations, such as the Coast Guard Centre and the KNRM, serve a large area of the sea. The availability of up-to-date information for rescue operations (such as information on currents, wave heights, wind directions and wind speeds) is currently limited. This information is essential for rescue operations, since such operations take a considerable amount of time; it thus necessary to be able to assess where an object will be at the estimated time of arrival of the rescue services. Information about the local conditions determine the rescue method that needs to be used.

Photo of the rescue vessel Koos van Messel

 

 

In addition to knowledge on and experience with techniques that have to be applied in such situations, West also has an ideal network of organisations to be able to solve such a complex problem.

 

Approach

Photo of the radar screen during a rescue operation Several disciplines were brought together in this project. ARGOSS supplied real-time earth observation data and made this available by means of web services. Ursa Minor developed algorithms for the prediction of locations. West produced the user interface and integrated the sub-systems that are located in different places. Based on the input of the users, the information from the other sub-systems is combined and shown geographically. The result: the "Environmental Distress Demonstrator" (EDD).

Technique

West used several open-source techniques in this project:

  • Web Feature Service (WFS) for presenting the call-out data. This information is stored in a PostGIS database.
  • Web Map Service (WMS) for presenting the map data.
  • Web services (especially WSDL and SOAP) for communication between the geographically distributed sub-systems.
  • Network Common Data (NetCDF) for exchanging environmental conditions and location predictions.
  • AJAX in order to create an interactive user interface.

The more specific customised components were created with the aid of Java and Perl.

Benefit

Photo of a 'drowned' person The EDD is demonstrated to the Coast Guard Centre and the KNRM using a simulation situation. A 'dummy' was put in the water five miles south west of Ijmuiden and allowed to float around for two hours. The EDD was used to predict the location of the rescue boat and the dummy. This enabled the usability of the EDD to be tested; with a positive result.

The project also realised a spin-off for new applications in the context of the Galileo programme.