The full operational capability of YARIS was declared on September 29th, 2020. Since this date, the system is fully available for real operations, and fully meets the pragmatic needs of the Yaoundé Architecture, including its operational organization.
YARIS was developed by the EU GoGIN project, for and with the Yaoundé Architecture.
YARIS was designed to allow the Yaoundé Achitecture and its member states to conduct end-to-end maritime security operations on a single tool. As such, YARIS allows the secure integration and organization of maritime information sources (systems, radar, satellite imagery, etc.), to merge and process them, to analyze, plan and conduct operations. In addition, YARIS offers its users a range of complementary communication tools (chat, email, video conferencing) accessible via Internet, allowing them to securely exchange information and coordinate.
The operational network of YARIS has been developing progressively since February 2021
The maritime centers of the Yaoundé architecture are connected to it as they receive the necessary training to fully exploit the tool. To date, 24 centers are connected to each other via the YARIS operational platform, which they use for national or multinational operations.
At the same time, like any software tool, YARIS is constantly evolving to meet the ambitions and perspectives of its future owners: for example, the objectives of YARIS being available to ships at sea, and more recently to aircraft, have been successfully achieved, thus offering innovative and promising coordination perspectives.
In addition, coordination experiments of the Yaoundé architecture centers with their international partners (i.e. UNODC, French Navy) were conducted on the training platform. These experiments led to the decision to include the MDAT-GoG in the YARIS operational network, for a trial period, so that it could broadcast the alerts received to the Yaoundé architecture centers concerned.
Finally, the lessons learned since February 2021 have enabled us to refine the procedures for using YARIS, which will be the subject of a simplified user guide, distributed and validated during the GANo 2021 exercise (Grand African Nemo, 27 October-8 November 2021).