Engineering, Consulting Firm Addresses 'System Engineering for Global Situation Awareness'

In May, the chapter and ASTER S.p.A, an engineering and consulting firm, held a workshop titled “System Engineering Solutions & Services for Global Situation Awareness” at the Italian Ministry of Defense C4 Headquarters in Rome. Chapter President Lt. Gen. Antonio Tangorra, ITAF (Ret.), introduced the workshop and thanked Brig. Gen. Calogero Massara, C4 Defense commander, for the hospitality. Valerio Pace, ASTER's marketing and sales manager, presented the Italian company operating in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East that designs and implements complex systems for the aerospace, defense and security industries. The systems engineering (SE) firm has a wide-ranging business model that includes critical system design for large technological infrastructures; proprietary technology development and licensing; monitoring, planning and decision-support systems based on open architectures; and training and tutoring. Lucio Tirone, ASTER technical director, presented products and services for defense and homeland security that are the cornerstone of the company's commercial offerings (MBSE package, tool chain management, SE training). Piero Beccari introduced material common operating pictures (M-COPs) as the information management and data fusion solution for a heterogeneous common operating picture (COP), developed for maritime surveillance application. M-COP enables the continuous monitoring of a COP’s federated network, with several autonomous systems interconnected, operating with common policies and interfaces. The above-mentioned product is embedded into Terrapack, the latest-generation web-oriented geographic information system (GIS) developed by ASTER, characterized by high compatibility with standards, modular structure and support of the most popular data exchange protocols. TerraPack benefits high interoperability, enabling a user-driven customization of the GIS environment, fitting several applications (emergency management, defense, environment, big data analytics). Mario Gammaldi gave a live demonstration of MCP Toolbox/TPK-NG, an ASTER product providing data fusion, integrated into the Terrapack Suite. Beccari also presented SpyGlass, a Galileo-based passive radar system for maritime surveillance. The primary task of the system is vessel detection and tracking in covert operation. This radar allows 24-hour, all-weather operations. Gen. Tangorra closed the event, thanking ASTER for the interesting workshop that provided a complete overview of the new criteria governing engineering and procuring C4ISR architectures and systems in the continuously changing context of global security.

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