Airbus Airbus Defence and Space has been contracted to provide a sophisticated mapping and monitoring service for the UK Ministry of Justice's (MOJ) new Electronic Monitoring programme, supporting the UK government's objective to reduce re-offending rates and better protect the public by monitoring the movement of offenders released under licence.

As part of a 3-year contract, Airbus Defence and Space based in Farnborough, UK, will provide critical location intelligence for sophisticated monitoring. Airbus Defence and Space's technology fulfils MOJ requirements for driving out service costs in a programme designed to revolutionise the way offenders are managed in the community.

"Using logic rules to monitor subject behaviour and advanced positioning technologies, Airbus Defence and Space transmits alerts to monitoring centres, thereby helping to reduce re-offending rates and offering greater reassurance and protection for the public", said Phil Brownnett, UK Managing Director of Airbus Defence and Space's Geo-Intelligence programme line.

Airbus Defence and Space, working closely with Capita who will operate the monitoring centres and Steatite who provide the ankle tag devices, will offer location intelligence services for offenders in the community, supplying high-precision information on the behaviour and location of offenders.

The new mapping and monitoring service also means that individual offenders subject to location monitoring can easily be identified as having been at the scene of a crime or quickly eliminated from an inquiry, allowing for swifter delivery of justice and reducing pressure on police time and money.

This is a significant improvement over existing technology, which only allowed monitoring officers to detect whether subjects have violated their curfews via radio-frequency identification (RFID) proximity monitoring of base stations installed in their homes.

The Airbus Defence and Space location intelligence solution uses the latest geospatial cloud and real-time messaging technologies to support criminal justice in the UK, applying a 35-year history of geospatial systems and service provision.

The use of geospatial cloud technologies also has the potential to benefit many other areas of central government in fields such as criminal justice, national resilience, land management, transport and environment - in turn offering huge efficiency saving through shared services. Airbus Defence and Space provides a web mapping interface giving the MOJ crucial improvement of position accuracy for evidential analysis in investigations.

Through its Geo-Intelligence business, Airbus Defence and Space - which has exclusive access to data from the SPOT, TerraSAR-X, TanDEM-X and Pleiades satellites - is recognised as one of the leaders in the geospatial information market. The company provides customers with complete solutions enabling them to increase security, maximize oil and gas or mining operations, improve their management of natural resources, and protect the environment.