Maritime Safety and Security Information System (MSSIS) Lab
Enhancing Maritime Situational Awareness in Waterways around the World
The U.S. DOT Volpe Center’s Situational Awareness and Logistics team has been at the vanguard of developing and deploying state-of-the-art, easy-to-use, cost-effective vessel tracking networks that enhance maritime situational awareness in waterways around the world. The U.S. DOT Volpe Center is renowned for its major technological advances in communications, vessel traffic management, and marine navigation systems.
More than 80 nations use the U.S. DOT Volpe Center’s Maritime Safety and Security Information System (MSSIS) Lab’s capabilities to maintain situational awareness of maritime operations. The systems developed and hosted in this Lab have been used by hundreds of government agencies for drug interdiction, rescue of mariners, fisheries enforcement, protection of endangered species, and many other purposes. Our Lab has received the Innovations in American Government Award from Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The Lab is named after MSSIS, an intergovernmental, freely shared, unclassified, near real-time global data aggregation and dissemination system that this team develops, operates, and maintains as a partnership between U.S. DOT and the Department of Defense.
The Lab’s main capabilities include the ability to design, develop, fabricate, test, evaluate, and maintain advanced radio navigation and computer information systems related to global vessel and asset tracking.
Inside the MSSIS Lab
Tools featured in the Lab include:
- Experimental/developmental computer servers and data networking systems
- Automatic Identification System (AIS) radio transponder equipment
- Oscilloscopes
- Spectrum analyzers
- Data network and protocol analyzers