The European Defence Agency (EDA) is continuing to promote maritime affairs and to develop, with Member States, the next generation of mine counter measure solutions via the successful delivery of Unmanned Maritime Systems projects.
The latest of the fifteen coordinated projects to be successfully delivered, that comprise the Unmanned Maritime Systems (UMS) Programme, one of the largest in the Agency, is the SIRAMIS project. This Dutch-led project, consisted of seven Contributing Members and addressed the knowledge gap of ship signatures with the overall aim of understanding ship signature interaction with multi-influence mines at a close range. This project presented a considerable challenge for the consortium, which comprised of industry, national research centres and academia, both in terms of signature measurement and signature analysis. It also placed an emphasis on cooperation and mutual support, which are the hallmarks of the EDA projects.
With the successful delivery of this project, plans are at an advanced stage for a follow-on project that will build on the advancements already made and will further address the modelling and simulation dimensions. A feature of the UMS programme is the coordination between projects, and the developments and gains made have positive implications for the follow-on Modular Lightweight Mine Sweeping project that will be launched shortly.
Maritime Conferences
The EDA is co-organising two conferences on maritime topics. These conferences present an opportunity to engage with key stakeholders and to fully explore and address the pertinent issues relating to the maritime domain.
The first conference will be held on 29th October 2015 in Berlin and is co-organised with EuroDefense Deutschland. The conference will focus on key questions that relate to UMS and principally address the operational perspective of the introduction of UMS, collaborative efforts resulting in technological advancements and, lastly, the area of legislation, safety and regulation will be explored.
The second conference will take place on the 12/13 November 2015 in Nicosia and is co-organised with the Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Cyprus. The conference will be conducted within the framework of the Luxembourg Presidency of the European Council. The focus of the conference will be on the Maritime Security Strategy and it will explore the challenges and potential benefits of the implementation of the strategy via its action plan. In particular, the conference will address Europe’s sea lines of communication and the challenges facing European navies. It will also examine the potential of the strategy to be considered as a catalyst for Civilian Military coordination.
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