Project description
Earth observation and AI-driven early-warning system in the Arctic region
As part of the Copernicus Service in Support to EU External Action (SEA) Service Evolution activities, the EU-funded ARCOS project presents an excellent opportunity to exploit artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and contribute to the expansion of SEA’s rich service portfolio. The project’s goal is to develop and implement an early-warning system to provide continuous monitoring of the Arctic region. The region is increasingly becoming more accessible due to the dramatic decline in ice cover, which creates new economic opportunities such as shipping routes and access to natural resources. As a result, security concerns are emerging that require increased demand for EU situational awareness.
Objective
Resulting from the dramatic decline in the ice cover, new economic opportunities are emerging, such as new traffic routes for the transport of goods from east to west and access to recently accessible natural resources. However, these changes have the potential to increase environmental threats and security concerns in the region coming from interest on the intensive exploitation of natural resources on the artic land areas; increasing risk of seaborne disaster and oil spills or establishment of permanent human facilities compromising European security. The consensus within the EU to maintain a multilateral cooperation approach to ensure stability and dialogued solution in the region triggers an increasing demand of situational awareness for the EU.
The objective of ARCOS is to design and implement an early-warning system providing continuous monitoring of the Arctic Region. Designed to generate actionable products in the security domain by processing and fusing multi-sensor data, the system integrates available information from space, non-space sources and products available from multiple Copernicus services.
ARCOS generates information at three different levels of scale and user interaction:
- Level 1. Automatic Early-warning System. Integration of space and non-space data sources for the triggering of alarms on the region when certain conditions are met. Automatic early-warnings are generated in case anomalous behaviours are detected. For this wide-area monitoring, automatic extraction of analytics and AI techniques are applied.
- Level 2. User-Driven Alert System, where space and non-space data is processed on specific locations provided by the user. The alarms can be configured based contextual information based on the user input.
- Level 3. Geospatial Intelligence Products. Following early-warnings generated in Level 1 or 2, geospatial intelligence products requiring human intervention are provided upon user request.
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
75100 Matera
Italy