Multimodal Situational Awareness for Civil-Military Coordination in Port Disruption Scenarios

Abstract

Disruptions in port access and transport infrastructures pose significant challenges for crisis management and civil–military coordination, particularly in dual-use environments. Decision-makers must cope with heterogeneous, incomplete, and partially conflicting information under time pressure. This work-in-progress paper introduces ARGUS, a generic multimodal decision-support architecture designed to consolidate diverse information sources into structured, geo-referenced incidents with explicit confidence values and traceable evidence. To explore the feasibility of core architectural concepts, a proof-of-concept instantiation is implemented for the port region of Wilhelmshaven, integrating a limited set of representative modalities, including emergency communication audio, social media reports, and hydrological sensor data. Exploratory results suggest that multimodal fusion can combine multiple raw alerts into fewer, more coherent incident views for specific port-access routes. At the same time, the proof of concept reveals challenges in merging nearby events too aggressively, interpreting confidence scores, and managing information in environments where civilian and military actors operate together.