Indra successfully tests the first prototype of European Maritime Operations Center in a multinational military exercise

Indra has lead the development of the first prototype of the European Maritime Operations Center located at the European Defense Agency (EDA) facilities in Brussels. The new Command and Control capacity, developed in collaboration with Leonardo, has been successfully tested this Wednesday and Thursday November 20 and 21 within a naval exercise in which the Navies of Italy, France, Greece, Portugal and Spain participated, within the framework of the EU-funded OCEAN2020 R&D program.

Five ships, aircraft and nine drones —aerial, boats and submarines— operated for two days in the waters of the Gulf of Taranto.

Their mission: to test the next generation of technologies that will reinforce the surveillance of blue waters, the furthest from the coast and the most difficult to control due to their vast size.

These tests reproduced the asymmetric attack of a speedboat equipped with anti-ship armament. A mine-laying vessel was also pursued and captured offshore, including the subsequent detection and neutralization of mines on the seabed.

The new Maritime Operations Center, operating with Indra’s iMARE system, acted as a node for the entire deployment, integrating the MARSUR maritime surveillance network very significantly in its operation. Each vessel maintained contact, either by satellite or through advanced secure communications links, with its national command center, which in turn connected to the new command center in Brussels.

The different navies saw their situational awareness increased in this way, expanding the surveillance zone that they could cover thanks to the coordination of the available assets.

This new center demonstrated its ability to process the data received and return a much more accurate single common image of the situation at sea. It also offered tools to support decision making and enabled real-time interaction with deployed ships.

Indra's European Maritime Center has been designed as the basis on which to develop a Military Command and Planning Capability in the future. It will provide the European Union Military Staff (EUMS) with a demonstrator of data integration and operational facilities enabling the commanders’ situational awareness.

In addition to testing the new center, Indra's Pelicano unmanned helicopter operated in an integrated manner with the vessel's systems deployed by the Navy for the exercise. The powerful cameras of Indra’s UAV enable the monitoring of targets many kilometers away.

After passing these first sea tests, the OCEAN2020 program now faces the next and final demonstration that will take place next year in the Baltic Sea.

Indra is one of the companies with most influence in this project, in which 42 companies and organizations from 15 countries coordinated by Leonardo participate. It will last three years and has a budget of 35 million euros.

This is one of the most important projects (grant agreement No 801697) launched within the EU Preparatory Action, a program that has served as a testing ground and prelude to the European Defense Fund that will be activated in 2021 and will allocate 3.5 billion euros to defense research in seven years.

Global leader in Defense

With the Preparatory Action, the EU takes a first step in building the Defense of Europe. In this new scenario, Indra is a company with a clear culture of leadership in the industrial sector.

The company has recently been appointed by the Spanish Government as national coordinator for the development of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), the largest joint European Defense program launched to date and the most ambitious in the continent in terms of technological development.

Indra is currently a member of nine consortia of the EDIDP (European Defense Industrial Development Program) and acts as the coordinator of three of the five led by Spain. These include the PESCO program for strategic command and control, probably the most important of them, involving Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Luxembourg and Portugal. Both EDIDP and PESCO are key instruments within the EU strategy to boost Defense cooperation.

To achieve this leadership position in Europe, Indra has relied on its previous experience in the most technologically demanding international and European programs, such as the Eurofighter, A400M, NH90, Meteor and ESSOR, as well as other projects outside Europe and in the NATO environment such as ESSM, FLEPS, ACCS and many others.

About Indra

Indra (www.indracompany.com) is one of the main global technology and consultancy companies and the technological partner for its customers’ key business operations around the world. It’s a major global supplier of proprietary solutions in specific segments of the Transportation and Defense markets and a leading company in digital transformation and information technology consultancy in Spain and Latin America by means of its Minsait subsidiary. Its business model is based on a comprehensive range of proprietary products, with an end-to-end approach that has high value and a significant innovative component. In 2018 Indra received income totaling 3.104 billion euros and had 43,000 employees, a local presence in 46 countries and business operations in more than 140 countries.