CMRE at the Forefront of NATO’s Interoperability

From June 9-25, 2015, NATO STO CMRE (Center for Maritime Research and Experimentation) scientists and engineers are at the Joint Force Training Center (JFTC) in Bydgoszcz (Poland) to take part in the annual NATO-led Coalition Warrior Interoperability eXploration, eXperimentation, eXamination, eXercise (CWIX) for the third time in a row. This year CWIX hosts participants from 15 NATO and 4 Partnership for Peace (PfP) Nations working on system interoperability before operational use to improve the effectiveness of the Alliance.

As the largest annual NATO-approved event of this kind, CWIX is a key tool to help in discovering the interoperability challenges of tomorrow, providing active support for the Readiness Action Plan (RAP), the Federated Mission Networking (FMN), the Smart Defense and Connected Forces Initiative (CFI) by pooling and sharing resources amongst NATO and Partner Nations. Interoperability and readiness are crucial to the success of the Alliance allowing national forces to deploy together and to be effective from the beginning of an operation through effective communications as one cohesive force. 

As NATO’s maritime research center, CMRE plays a crucial role in the exercise with six experimental capabilities fully integrated in the CWIX scenarios, such as the Geospatial and Meteorological and Oceanographic (GeoMETOC), the Maritime and the Joint/Operational Command focus areas. In particular CMRE is providing to the Nations in 2015 new scientific products focused on: oceanographic information/forecast; data fusion from multiple and heterogeneous sources; environmentally-conditioned risk maps, such as small boat attack risk maps; sonar performance surfaces for tactical planning; maritime traffic patterns of life and detection of vessels outside normal traffic schemes; and automatic planning of sea surface and underwater assets. 

The main challenge of CMRE for this 2015 exercise is to correctly provide these scientific products to command and control (C2) NATO and PfP systems. State-of-the-art web services, protocols and NATO standards are used to effectively communicate with these systems. CMRE is testing these experimental capabilities, identifying interoperability shortfalls to improve them and contributing to the effectiveness of the Alliance through its participation in CWIX 2015.