Faced with mounting IMO compliance challenges and ever stricter CII rating criteria, vessel owners are challenged to operate more efficiently. However, traditional methods are unlikely to keep pace with the increased regulatory requirements. This has the maritime industry increasingly looking to emerging technology for game-changing ways of optimising performance for individual vessels and entire fleets. Advancements in three areas offer great promise and are trending strongly: DataOps, digital twins, and AI.
Onboard and onshore, disconnected systems frequently serve as a bottleneck for getting better insights from consumption data. When your crews need to manually input vessel data, that drains their own productivity and makes the 24-hourly vessel reports more cumbersome. To get full insight into ongoing operations and identify areas for improvement, you first need connected data.
Embracing DataOps in maritime is all about using vessel-to-cloud data infrastructure that captures and aggregates data from offshore and onshore in a secure manner, serving as a key foundation for the digitalisation of vessels. Greater data availability provides a live and consistent view of vessels in a fleet, and this data can be utilised in different applications to support goals like IMO compliance, fuel consumption reduction and routing optimisation.
Faced with the necessity of large-scale digital transformation in an industry that is already experiencing a skills gap, some vessel owners may be unsure where to start. It’s also difficult for crew members to effectively act on fuel consumption and other vessel performance data if they have to learn many new systems and can’t find information easily.
With a digital twin, crew members have full insight into vessel performance metrics like routing, weather conditions and fuel consumption patterns. With the added power of simulations, crew members can be trained for hazardous scenarios without having to leave the port. Vessel data availability in a digital twin helps crew and stakeholders identify faulty equipment, plan optimal routes and discover optimisations for fuel consumption, daily operations and more.
Opportunities to reach unprecedented levels of efficiency are missed every day when your vessels are stuck in a reactive mode of operating. To take a more proactive approach, vessel owners are challenged to leverage automation and machine learning algorithms to get faster and deeper insights.
By selecting high-frequency use cases, an AI-powered digital twin can identify patterns to drive optimisations and work towards fully autonomous work processes that offer transparency while remaining compliant with industry regulations. Automating data entry and reporting tasks such as logbooks reduces officer workloads, improves data quality and accelerates the transition towards smarter ways of working.
All three trends go hand in hand, as you need the high-quality centralised data of DataOps to get better results from machine learning. A digital twin offers an ideal context to interact with AI-generated suggestions and needs these to be more effective. The challenge lies in understanding what these trends really mean for the maritime industry, what they can do and how you can begin to leverage them.
Are you ready to get past the buzz and uncover how DataOps, digital twins, and AI can help you optimise vessel performance like never before? Get your hands on our in-depth guide Three Trends Poised to Transform the Heavy-Asset Sector in 2024 for in-depth analysis, industry insider tips, and actionable strategies for adoption.
