Welcome to WECDIS.com, the online home of the naval ECDIS community. The term WECDIS stands for "Warship Electronic Chart Display and Information System" and is also known by some nations as ECDIS-N, where the N stands for "Navy".
ECDIS systems are the future of navigation at sea, following mandation by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO). In a rolling programme from July 2010, all seagoing vessels above a certain tonnage will be required to install an ECDIS. More information about civilian ECDIS mandation is available on the ECDIS Ltd website.
The British Royal Navy (RN) and Royal Fleet Auxillary (RFA) were the first military organisations in the world to fit NATO-standard WECDIS systems to their warships and auxillaries. The initial contract was signed on January 8th 2004.
A rolling installation programme began in July of that year and WECDIS was fitted, first to the capital ships, destroyers and frigates and then in the various survey and minor war vessels.
Since the Royal Navy, other nations have followed suit, including US Coast Guard (August 2007), Royal Australian Navy (October 2007), Brazilian Navy (February 2008) and Royal Netherlands Navy (August 2009).
Possible functions of a WECDIS system may include:
- Monitoring and control of the WAIS transponder including world-wide ship database
- Additional Military Layers (AMLs) for presentation of military information such as tactical areas
- Interface with CMS
- Missile safety zones and gun weapon arcs
- Advanced Pool-of-Errors
- Target Motion Analysis (TMA)
- Intercept point, for estimation of where, when and how own ship can intercept a target
- Screen display for task group tactical manouevres
- Mission recording including navigational data, external inputs and audio
- Display of video from electro-optical (EOD) and CCTV sources
