Facilitating Short Sea Shipping and supporting EU customs authorities with additional information about ships, their journey and their cargoes within the EU

The EMSA (European Maritime Safety Agency) Blue Belt pilot project was initiated by the EU Belgian Presidency and endorsed on 2 December 2010 by the EU Council of Transport Ministers to be implemented by EMSA. Its objective was to facilitate Short Sea Shipping and support EU customs authorities providing them with additional information about ships, their journey and their cargoes within the EU. The project was to combine official customs tools and vessel monitoring and tracking tools, in order to facilitate custom procedures and assist customs decision-making process. The IAP (ARTES 20 element) demonstration project supported the EMSA Blue Belt Project described above, by providing a service based on satellite-based AIS data complementing the terrestrial data. Such a service can detect offshore vessels equipped with AIS tracking devices, impossible to detect by shore-based systems alone. The EMSA project was therefore supported through the tracking of a number of "blue ships", which undergo the demonstration phase, and for the ships in the areas of interest. This was achieved thanks to the acquisition of space-based AIS data and integration with the terrestrially collected data. The data delivered was assessed with regards to quality, reliability, and suitability to meet end-user and stakeholder requirements. The activity thus demonstrated that SAT-AIS services can be an added-value to the terrestrial AIS data for such ship tracking based services.