Use Case Analysis for Maritime Domain Awareness Tools

Online portals, web maps, dashboards, or common operating pictures are popular tools used in the maritime community to effectively plan, execute, and analyze operations. With the multitude of maritime domain awareness (MDA) tools available to today’s maritime planner, awareness and understanding of their features are critical to the selection of the proper tool at the proper time. Members of the maritime community often use previous events to evaluate, learn, and improve response efforts or techniques. Coordinators of marine events use prior cases as the foundation for planning and organizing the next event response. This analysis will directly compare three different web-based tools (MARCO Portal, MARACOOS OceansMap, and ESRI Living Atlas) currently accessible by maritime planners and evaluate potential implementation strategies. Insight into how users can more effectively leverage specific MDA tools is provided. The aim of this paper is to instill a mindset within operators and managers that does not discount any one particular MDA tool, but allows users to identify the strengths and weakness of each one. This will allow users to combine the assets of multiple MDA tools for the overall improvement of their organization. Authors place significant emphasis on training and acknowledge that awareness of any one particular MDA tool is not enough to garner effective use of the tool. Continued objective analysis of an MDA tool’s ability to address the tasks assigned to each watchstander or user is critical to its sustained effective use.