TACSA: A web-service based system for coastal surveillance and situational awareness

In this paper we present the design aspects of TACSA, a web-service based system for maritime situational awareness regarding coastal surveillance, marine traffic supervision, illegal activities detection, and so forth. TACSA is implemented on the basis of service oriented architecture (SOA). Its software codes are process centric with most of them coming from the reuse of existing programs in conjunction with wrapping of interfaces in compliance with the open standards of web service. A prototype TACSA containing four service tiers is experimentally built. Each service tier, in turn consists of several service components towards different applications in maritime domain. An in-house test with real time observation data taken from surveillance sensors is carried out and the test results demonstrate the effectiveness of this system.