The main objective of SAURON is to provide a multidimensional situation awareness platform. This platform is installation-specific and is aimed at helping port operators anticipate and withstand potential cyber, physical or combined threats to their freight and cargo business and to the safety of their employees, visitors, passengers and local citizens.
Coordinated terrorist attacks are these days becoming increasingly complex with ever greater impact. Due to the growing reliance of the industrial sector and many critical infrastructures (CI) —in particular EU ports— on ICT systems, the impact of a coordinated physical attack, a deliberate disruption of critical automation (cyber) systems or even a combined scenario including both kinds of attacks, could have disastrous consequences for the European Member States’ regions and social wellbeing in general.
With this in mind, and given the very real threat to EU ports as one of the main CI in Europe, the SAURON project proposes a holistic situation awareness concept as an integrated, scalable and installation-specific solution for protecting EU ports and their surroundings.
The four main pillars that will comprise the SAURON platform are:
- Physical Situation Awareness (PSA), which includes novel features such as: dynamic location of resources and assets; location, management and monitoring of sensors, including cameras, security perimeter control, facial recognition, etc.
- Cyber Situation Awareness (CSA), a system capable of preventing and detecting threats and, in the event of a declared attack, capable of mitigating the effects of the infection/intrusion.
- Hybrid Situation Awareness (HSA), a system that receives both physical and cyber alarms on potential threats from the real world and cyber space, respectively. The HSA application will show the potential consequences/effects of these threats on the different planes, including cascading effects.
- Emergency Population Warning System (EPWS), which enables the warning to be transmitted simply and quickly to local, regional, or national authorities, in order to organize rescue teams, security, ambulances etc. It also allows integration with Smart City Platforms (SCP) in order to warn the public.
