Maritime surveillance by integrating remote sensing and AIS: A preliminary analysis

An integration of EO constellations and future space AIS systems to enable ship traffic management and identification of illegal maritime operations is analyzed in terms of revisit time. In particular, functional integration of COSMO/SkyMed with other future EO constellations offers a great improvement on revisit time of Mediterranean area, which is reduced from 15 to less than 6 hours. The novel method developed to design AIS constellations leads to a candidate system relying on 8 satellites on 4 orbital planes which guarantee a ship location update of less than 1 hour and a mean time between EO images and AIS data retrieval of slightly less than 30 minutes.