Monitoring of Critical Undersea Infrastructures: the Nord Stream and Other Recent Case Studies

The explosions on September 26th, 2022, which damaged the gas pipelines of Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, have highlighted the need and urgency of improving the re- silience of Critical Undersea Infrastructures (CUIs). Comprising gas pipelines and power and communication cables, these con- nect co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE aerospace and electronic systems magazine 2023-10, Vol.38 (10), p.1-18
Main Authors: Soldi, Giovanni, Gaglione, Domenico, Raponi, Simone, Forti, Nicola, d'Afflisio, Enrica, Kowalski, Pawel, Millefiori, Leonardo M., Zissis, Dimitris, Braca, Paolo, Willett, Peter, Maguer, Alain, Carniel, Sandro, Sembenini, Giovanni, Warner, Catherine
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
anomaly detection
Artificial intelligence
Autonomous underwater vehicles
Communication cables
Damage
Data integration
Explosions
Gas pipelines
Global economy
HUMINT
information fusion
Infrastructure
Maritime surveillance
Meteorology
Monitoring
multitarget tracking
Natural gas
Ocean floor
OSINT
Pipelines
Remotely operated vehicles
satellite imaging
seabed-to-space situ- ational awareness
Situational awareness
Surveillance
synthetic aperture radar
Undersea
underwater acoustics
Underwater cables
Underwater communication
unmanned underwater vehicles
Weather
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Summary:The explosions on September 26th, 2022, which damaged the gas pipelines of Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, have highlighted the need and urgency of improving the re- silience of Critical Undersea Infrastructures (CUIs). Comprising gas pipelines and power and communication cables, these con- nect countries worldwide and are critical for the global economy and stability. An attack targeting multiple of such infrastruc- tures simultaneously could potentially cause significant damage and greatly affect various aspects of daily life. Due to the in- creasing number and continuous deployment of CUIs, existing underwater surveillance solutions, such as Autonomous Under- water Vehicles (AUVs) or Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), are not adequate enough to ensure thorough monitoring.We show that the combination of information from both un- derwater and above-water surveillance sensors enables achieving Seabed-to-Space Situational Awareness (S3A), mainly thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Information Fusion (IF) method- ologies. These are designed to process immense volumes of infor- mation, fused from a variety of sources and generated from mon- itoring a very large number of assets on a daily basis. The learned knowledge can be used to anticipate future behaviors, identify threats, and determine critical situations concerning CUIs.To illustrate the capabilities and importance of S3A, we con- sider three events that occurred in the second half of 2022: the aforementioned Nord Stream explosions, the cutoff of the under- water communication cable SHEFA-2 connecting the Shetland Islands and the UK mainland, and the suspicious activity of a large vessel in the Adriatic Sea. Specifically, we provide analy- ses of the available data, from Automatic Identification System (AIS) and satellite data, integrated with possible contextual in- formation, e.g., bathymetry, Patterns Of Life (POLs), weather conditions, and human intelligence (HUMINT).
ISSN:0885-8985
1557-959X
DOI:10.1109/MAES.2023.3285075