Task 6. Establish a Centralized Vessel Control System.

A centralized vessel control system should be developed that will positively identify and locate all participating vessels in real-time. The data generated from this primary system must be processed, disseminated, and stored throughout the system to be available for other applications.

The system should monitor conformance to vessel schedule on a real-time basis to ensure that Caribbean Sea  operations remain within operational constraints. A schedule conformance summary report should be available on a scheduled basis at the shore monitor station. This report should indicate whether operating vessels are within schedule tolerance to execute Caribbean Sea vessel operations "as planned". This report will provide a snapshot of estimated tourist load-factor at historical sites and ports as well as vessel load-factor at all Caribbean Sea facilities. When schedule or load-factor violates preset thresholds, an out-of-bounds alert must be issued to shore station operators.

When an out-of-bounds schedule or load-factor condition is detected at the shore station monitor, the system must provide automated tools to reschedule assets. Rescheduling of assets must minimize impact to vessel itineraries. Manual over-ride of automated scheduling must be supported.

Concept System Capabilities:

The system should provide the Main Traffic Management Center with the following capabilities:

1. Accurate determination of the location of each equipped vessel.

2. High resolution color graphic map displays to show the position of  the vessels.

3. Capability to show the previous path of each vessel.

4. Tracking vessels position with capability of simultaneous tracking of up to 500 vessels.

5. Emergency status of all vessels.

6. Capability of designating and separately displaying special temporary groups of vessels.

7. Tracking and identifying vessels that belong to different departments; i.e. fire fighting, emergency, etc.

8. Instant positioning of all vessels with respect to the position of any other vessel or pre-determined sites such as berths, locks etc. The vessel or site which is the focus of attention then becomes "highlighted" with respect to the position of all vessels in the system.

1. A computer system which will automatically interrogate and plot geographically vessel position on a visual graphic display.

2. Computer generated maps which geographically indicate the position of the vessels.

3. Radio system interface equipment that receives the data transmitted from the vessels and transmits polling commands to the vessels.

4. Three work stations for dispatching and monitoring.

5. Wall mounted high resolution rear projection liquid-colored graphic video projection system.

6. Vessel Equipment:

Designated vessels should be equipped with special DGPS receivers that are connected with stand-alone VHF/ UHF transceivers. This equipment will continuously track the geographic location of the vessel and transmit the information to the Main Traffic Management Center using two-way radio. Multiple channels should be used throughout the area to ensure good geographic coverage.

Each vessel shall be provided with a notebook computer and software to assist the pilot and captain in Caribbean Sea navigation. GPS data shall be fed into the notebook. Each notebook computer shall have software running off of the hard disk drive or off of a CD-ROM drive. The software must provide: 1) rasterized chart information, 2) vectorized symbolic information zoomable over a wide range, 3) a 3D display of the Caribbean Sea, it’s islands and ports, as well as surrounding terrain and 4) a Microsoft Windows environment with multi-window display.

These points should have the following attributes:

1) Charts: zoomable over a useful range and into port level detail if such charts are available, the vessel icon stays centered on the chart display unless approaching the edge of a chart image, ability to look ahead or around (browse) a chart image being used for navigation with automatic snap back to the current location after a few seconds,  browsing of one or more chart images in one window while navigating in another, concentric ranging circles of known diameter drawn around the vessel location to estimate distances, user enterable waypoints displayed on the chart (lat/long capture and store), a circle in the vessel icon the center of which is the exact lat/long location as received by the GPS.

2) Symbols: a vectorized display showing the shoreline and islands of the Caribbean Sea, cities, buoys, lighthouses and other objects relevant to navigation, north-up or course-up display orientation, widely scaleable presentation (zoom), user enterable waypoints which are then displayed (lat/long capture, store and display), uses the same icon used on the chart display with a circle in the center on the exact GPS lat/long, “off-center” navigation by dragging the vessel icon anyplace on the display and it will stay there, concentric ranging circles noted in Charts paragraph above.

3) Three D: a 3D rendered presentation from the vessels current GPS lat/long and track, four display options: wireframe, wireframe with hidden lines removal, shaded polygons and outlined plus shaded polygons, a minimum of 30 arc second resolution, visual land proximity ranging providing a one to seven mile warning of up coming land, display of port cities, user entered waypoints and relevant navigable objects in the 3D space as graphic objects, browsing to look ahead and around with snap back after a few seconds, four views; forward, aft, left and right, variable view range of at least 4.3 to 11.3 nautical miles, view scroll up or down, display of the high and low elevations of the view being presented, display update every 30 arc seconds of travel or better.

4) Microsoft Windows environment: display of multiple chart, symbols or 3D windows at once in any combination, different zoom factors allowed and different attributes displayable in different windows.

The software should also include: a next waypoint/destination window with the course over water, speed, ETA, ETE (time to go), and cross track error, plus similar data for all waypoints to the destination port which can be paged through with a keypress, user enterable waypoints by lat/long, mouse click or pressing a function key, recording and playback of the Caribbean Sea journey, display of relevant GPS data while it is being used by the software, browsing of any chart, symbols or 3D area, creation of a course and ability to generate a recorded cruise and play it back in real or accelerated time.

Concept System Operation:

It is expected that the computer control system will be based at the Main Traffic Management Center  in Jamaica. The computer system is expected to support three vessel traffic controllers. Each vessel traffic controller would require a computer console with  its own control/listing terminal and ultra-high resolution color graphic display monitor.

One computer system controller should normally act as the master for polling control. If the master computer system controller should fail, the polling function should be automatically assumed by  an additional back-up, master computer  standing by. Each computer system controller should contain a complete data base of  assigned  vessels operating within the assigned sector in the system as well as necessary system software. With this arrangement it is expected that each vessel will be assigned to one of the vessel traffic controllers for routine dispatch and control.  Vessels should normally appear only on the display of the computer console to which they are assigned. The computer control system should be designed so that an active vessel cannot be left unassigned. If the system is manned by only one human dispatcher at any certain time, all vessels can be placed under supervision of  another dispatcher's computer console system controller. If a computer system console controller fails, all vessels are handled by the remaining computer system controller.

The DGPS receiver onboard of the vessel should have a microprocessor based telemetry interface, which will interfaced with the radio data transceiver. Once the vessel is "logged-on", the system controller automatically polls the vessel to obtain its current location. Polling request are received from  the vessel DGPS receiver on the assigned data channel and passed to the DGPS receiver unit for processing. When the unit receives a valid request, it transmits its identification and location information to the system controller via the dedicated data channel. This information is used by the system controller  computer to automatically update the position of the vessel on the computer visual graphic display. The dispatch operator can show the vessel position in relation to the Caribbean Sea maps to be developed and provided. A "Zoom" facility should be provided to allow enlargement of any specific area, showing maximum available details. Maps displayed on the high resolution monitors are to be computer generated from information stored in the computer memory, these maps are to have general geographic outlines of the Caribbean Sea and its surrounding inland boundaries. Upgraded versions of maps are expected to be provided in the future to accommodate charges and additions.