On September 28 and 29, acting as ANDROMEDA project partner, GMV organized and moderated the first ANDROMEDA workshop.

Andromeda, a Horizon-2020 project involving 19 partners from 9 different countries, aims to speed up detection and control of new incidents (human trafficking, arms or drugs smuggling, for example), to improve decision-making and reach joint decisions in handling cross-border situations. It is working with a distributed set of interconnected systems and services according to the principles of the Common Information Sharing Environment (CISE).

The webinar sessions were held online due to the current COVID-19 epidemic.

The purpose of this online event was to discuss maritime- and land-border security and the need to encourage collaborative environments that favor the exchange of information between different countries and agencies. The technical sessions dealt with issues such as ANDROMEDA’s promising results so far, the current status of CISE, the extension of its data model for use in land C2 systems and in Decision Support systems.

Besides the technical sessions, the workshop also featured several maritime- and land-security experts from various countries, who talked about their current problems in this area and their way of fighting against the threats they face on a daily basis.

The seminar closed with a session looking at the main European security projects, analyzing their common denominators. The seminar invited special guests from European agencies like EMSA, FRONTEX and JRC, who put forward their ideas in the various workshop sessions.

David Merino, head of GMV’s maritime surveillance section, moderated various sessions of the two days and also drew the final conclusions of the workshop. Fernando Labarga, technical head of the ANDROMEDA project, gave a paper under the title of “The ANDROMEDA high-level architecture and system components”, focusing on the challenges involved in the design of a CISE system of systems for surveillance of both land- and maritime-borders. He also described how the NATO Architecture Framework (NAF) methodology can help to tackle these challenges.