Pattern of Life – in a maritime military context
About the publication
Report number
21/01852
ISBN
978-82-464-3363-3
Format
PDF-document
Size
1.1 MB
Language
English
Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) has, on request from the Norwegian Joint Headquarters (NJHQ), conducted a study of “Pattern of Life (PoL)”. The expression Pattern of Life (PoL) has been used for some years by a diversity of civilian and governmental organizations to describe and reveal how people, ships, air planes, cars, and systems of different kinds move around in an area of interest (e.g. city, harbour, littoral waters or at sea). The ultimate goal has been to discover anomalies in these movements and thereby reveal illegal and suspicious behavior. Our task has been to find a good definition that can be used operationally in connection with maritime surveillance. PoL has for many years been a concept that has been used in connection with different operations conducted by both countries and organizations worldwide. Complex operations have been carried through internationally in which one a priori has assumed that everyone knows what PoL is. However, no good and all-embracing definition has been provided by the literature. This is especially the case for maritime operations in general. Everyone involved states that they are conducting PoL analysis of data collected in connection with different types of operations without any reference to a widely accepted definition of PoL.
We have searched the internet for available literature related to PoL. On the basis of this material we have found both a generic definition of the concept, and developed a maritime version of this definition that can be applied in an operational context. PoL is a complex, diverse and not least dynamic concept that will change with time of the year as well as from year to year. It is therefore necessary with effective maintenance routines of both the sources of information and the libraries used in the analysis to find vessels of interest. These vessels may be pinpointed by the NJHQ for further inspection and identification. This is, however, a different kind of work than we have been asked to perform and will imply more labor such that the concept can be used as effectively as possible.
In this report, we have ended up with a maritime definition of PoL based upon a relatively new paper that gives a generic definition of PoL. This paper also gives a procedure for how PoL should be applied based on information from several sources of information and different types of libraries. In this connection, the perhaps most important aspect of the analysis we can pinpoint here is that PoL is a dynamic concept developing with time, and not a static picture. This fact will be the basis, as well as the limitation, for how PoL analysis should be carried out.