EU SeaBILLA (Sea Border Surveillance) program unveiled

SELEX Sistemi Integrati, a Finmeccanica company, has launched the European research and development project SeaBILLA (Sea Border Surveillance).
SeaBILLA, proposed to the European Union as a research and development project on maritime and boarders surveillance, has recently obtained a funding of about 15,5 million Euros within the 7° Framework Programme “Security Research Call2”.
The Finmeccanica company is leader of a consortium which will manage the 45 month long programme, and will coordinate 26 National and International partners belonging to the industrial and the academic world. The project is compliant with a requirement from the European Union of an integrated maritime policy which, within a few years, is supposed to allow the European Countries to share a common environment of relevant information for the surveillance and control of the European maritime borders. In particular, SeaBILLA aims to demonstrate the possibility to enhance maritime boarder control through the net-centric integration of different kinds of surveillance systems: from space systems for the Earth observation to naval and coastal systems and equipments installed on unmanned or manned air vehicles, up to the most innovative radar systems, such as passive sensors. The project is also expected to examine innovative technologies for data fusion and information elaboration for tracking, classification, identification and automated evaluation of vessels behaviors. From an operational point of view SeaBILLA will allow a timely and efficient detection of illicit actions both along the coasts and in the open sea, according to the principles of the 7th Framework Programme and of the Security Call itself whose main scope is the achievement of effective improvements of Security in Europe.
SELEX Sistemi Integrati’s leadership in SeaBILLA is perfectly coherent with its mission of architect and Large systems integrator. In fact, within Finmeccanica, the company is the design authority and prime contractor for the design and manufacturing of large and complex systems, by using its own and the other Finmeccanica companies products and capabilities.

Source SELEX SI