Hosted by Thales and Wiser in Florence, a hybrid workshop was dedicated on October 28th in which Carmen Perea, Head of ARI’s Transport Systems and Urban Mobility Unit, and David Gómez (Artificial Intelligence and Big Data Unit) attended virtually to present ARI’s main contribution to the project, which has consisted in the design (hardware and software) and development of three VDES (Very High Frequency Data Exchange System) transceivers.

​​​​​​​As technical coordinator of the ICT domain, Gómez presented an overview of the PALAEMON platform, responsible for exchanging data with the VDES ecosystem. He spoke about the three use cases that harness the utilization of a ship-to-shore radio communication: overhearing of legacy ship’s AIS information (e.g., ship position, speed, heading, etc.), gathering of weather forecast (i.e., from a third-party service every three hours), and transmission of distress messages every 90 seconds (i.e., in the event of evacuation). He also showed an interactive demo.

The workshop was also devoted to the VDES developed by THALES and WISER in the context of the project. In a nutshell, VDES is supposed to become the de-facto radio communication system between ships, shore (i.e., Port Authorities) and satellites, replacing the traditional Automatic Identification System (AIS) communications. Namely, WISER focuses on the hardware design of up to three VDES transceivers. On top of the physical part, they relied on Software Design Radio (SDR) to cope with the physical and link layer implementation. On the other side, THALES is responsible for the middleware that bring connection between the transceivers and the core of the system.