Project « Analysis of marine information for environmentally safely shipping», funded by ESPA. Coordinator: Dr S. Perantonis  (NCSR “D” Institute of Informatics & Telecommunications) Dr. Z Nivolianitou is leader for SRISL [2013-2015]

The goal of the AMINESS project is to contribute in the safety, management and monitoring of the sea environment and the Aegean Sea in particular. Reducing the possibility of ship accidents in the Aegean Sea is important to all economic, environmental, and cultural sectors of Greece. Oil spill cleanups can cost over 1 billion Euros, whereas accidents involving water soluble cargos would result in irrevocable changes to the Aegean ecosystem. Despite an increase in traffic, there are no national-level monitoring policies and ships formulate routes according to their best judgment. However, to reduce their own financial risk, shipping companies would directly benefit from a system that can reduce the possibility of an accident involving their own ship.The project objective is the development of a web portal offering access to ship owners, policy makers and the scientific community. The portal will be used to (a) suggest vessel and environmentally optimal safe route planning (b) deliver real-time alerts for ships and (c) support policy recommendations. The portal will be based on historical and real-time maritime data, including real-time information for ship position and speed, weather and sea forecasting and land and sea location. Through this web-portal, the project aims directly to reduce the risk of a ship accident and consequently to contribute in the protection of the Aegean Sea. At the same time, the web-portal aims to bring profit to the enterprise partners of the project, mainly by proposing accident risk reducing services to ship owners.

The research partners will be given a unique opportunity to advance their methodologies for handling and analysis of huge quantities of heterogeneous spatiotemporal streaming data to assess risk in real time. Any lessons learned from the analysis of the high risk ship traffic of the Aegean Sea are likely to have direct and immediate relevance to policy makers and stakeholders globally.