Challenges for Co-operation in Achieving Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) from the Operator's Perspective. Lessons learned from MNE5 MSA Experimentations

Kirjoittajat

• Anne Koskinen

Abstrakti

Achieving Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) is a challenge whether we are operating nationally or internationally. When operating internationally, the situational awareness plays even a bigger role. Many issues from cultural differences to language barriers can affect the smoothness of co-operation. Co-operation is a crucial key to a successful operation throughout national boundaries. Co-operation requires all participants to share relevant information in order to collaborate and act in a challenging environment. The main initiative in this article is to cover lessons learned from the MNE5 MSA Experimentation (Multinational Experimentation 5 Maritime Situational Awareness). Results from the Experimentation cover factors that affect the situational awareness and this is done from the perspective of co-operation and information sharing. The objective of the Experimentation was to discover issues that affect the MOC team’s performance but also to observe the co-operation inside a MOC and between MOC teams. MNE5 MSA Experimentation was conducted in partnership with the Navy Command Finland, Naval Warfare Centre of Sweden and NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and the Singaporean Armed Forces (SAF) Future Systems Directorate. The main goal was to study how MOC teams are able to achieve and maintain Maritime Situational Awareness during two different Events (Event 2 and 3) that included two separate scenarios. Event 1 was conducted to baseline our national MOC processes to facilitate a better understanding of MOC operations nationally and when working as part of an international effort. MNE5 MSA Experimentation Events explored the influence of social, technical and organizational factors of problem solving and information sharing in the maritime domain. This study gave us significant information for the future development - both nationally and internationally: Findings from the MNE5 MSA Experimentation gave input to our national development. Some of the findings have already been and will be implemented to the development of our national MSA capabilities. Because situational awareness (SA) is an essential element in co-operations, Experimentation results are presented and analyzed in this article from the SA perspective.