Why we are reshaping the ship

MARITIME technology firms have become adept at painting a pretty picture of the future of shipping.

The future of the industry seemingly revolves around glass and chrome interiors, ships with crystal clear lines on emerald blue waters, and large touch screen mirrors of incongruous controls that simultaneously suggest complexity and simplicity. It is a compelling image, one that often comes with eye-catching headlines in the mainstream media,  such as “Unmanned ‘ghost’ ships are coming!”

And when reading these articles about digital solutions, cyber controls, autonomous or unmanned vehicles of the future, it’s easy to forget that the real world of shipping consists of thousands of steel hulls with dark oily enginerooms, noisy wheel houses full of alarm notifications and human-made rule-based decisions.

A ship’s bridge is a strange place to be at the best of times. It is a workspace and a home office, a regulated industrial area and a place that must fight some of the wildest elements the ocean can throw at it.

So the reaction of the crew members of Highland Chieftain, an offshore vessel based out of the Scottish port of Aberdeen, when they witnessed their vessel being controlled by someone sat in a control centre in San Diego, USA, should make you too realise this is getting different.

Experienced seafarers, familiar with operating the multi-million dollar vessel in the harsh cruel storms of the North Sea,  the Highland Chieftan’s crew are accustomed to making decisions and living by them, it is no surprise they were astonished.

According to Stephen Lee, General Manager at GulfMark Offshore, the tests showed the crew that these capabilities were real, and that this really is a paradigm shift in the industry.

“The crew were initially apprehensive,” he said during a Fathom SmartTALK, explaining that they thought this was a step towards removing crews from ships. Then there was doubt that these trials were gong to work.

But they did work. In an area south of Aberdeen, clear of any other shipping or navigational hazards, the ship was put through some dynamic-positioning tests.

“The tests and trials proved very conclusive that the proof of concept actually works,” said Lee.

And then,when they were done with the DP tests, Wärtsilä, the engineering giant conducting these tests, asked if they could take the ship part of the way back to Aberdeen.

“It was at that point that everyone realised that this trial and this technology and the future of shipping was about to change,” explained Lee during the SmartTALK. “Nobody touched a thing on the bridge or the engine room and the ship headed towards Aberdeen.”

While the ability to control a ship by remote control may prove that a satellite connection can do same job that one can see on many a park boating lake with radio-controlled boating enthusiast, Wärtsilä head of ship design Riku Pekka Hägg told SmartTALK that there are some far-reaching consequences that will materialise.

Ships will not be suddenly devoid of crews. That can not happen. First there are regulations such as STCW and other international conventions that any ship without a crew would be contravening if it was built today. Insurers and clients may also have other thoughts. GulfMark’s Lee pointed out that within the 500m exclusion zone of an offshore installation the energy major will certainly not want to see experimental autonomous systems. That is far too much a risk for them to stomach.

The exception to current international law, of course, is any ship sailing in a country’s territorial waters where that country’s maritime authorities give a dispensation. This is what has happened with the proposed Yara Birkland, a small coastal vessel designed and already model tested by Kongsberg for the fertiliser and chemical maker Yara.

This vessel has rapidly become the talisman for unmanned ships in the mainstream press. It will be quite small by shipping standards today, around 80 m in length, and used to take containerised Yara cargoes from a manufacturing site in a Norwegian fjord, to a nearby port round a southerly rocky headland.

A change in design thinking

What does this technology and these new logistics business models have to do with ship design and engineering? Well, everything, according to Hägg.

Ships are designed based on human experience, knowhow and an education, he says. Artificial Intelligence uses computing power and combined data from many different sources, to come up with unique solutions.

AI gains its experience from data. It basically teaches itself based on the data, says Hägg, and ship designers will therefore need to change how they think about ship design in the future.

With artificial intelligence empowered with machine learning it will offer new thoughts about engineering which do not have the limitations of human experience and learning.

Basically, Artificial Intelligence can think ‘out of the box’ because it simply does not have the box of restrictions surrounding it. This suggests it can give some solutions that have new potential (though making sure they still fit under safety regulations of course)

What Kongsberg and Yara have said about the Yara Birkeland is that the vessel will be built with a wheelhouse and will be operated by a crew. the wheelhouse will be removed, presumably with the crew able to monitor operations from a shipborne control centre, and then from shore-based control centre.

This is where connectivity will likely impact shipbuilding initially suggests Hägg; this ability to create a 360 degree surveillance around a vessel, something a watchkeeper/navigator in a wheelhouse would never have. Ships will be operated differently and therefore built differently to meet the changing criteria.

“Ships are getting smarter, and yes there will be autonomous operations which means the systems do some of the operations that crews have done,” he said. With the huge array of sensors and data sources, ship designers will need to be aware of these technologies and understand the implications on the vessels.

So new vessels could be built with new thinking to where the wheelhouses are placed.

Cargo capacity and fuel performance are the two critical factors in a vessel’s design, and naval architects would likely welcome a redesign of their offering to clients which showed a significant improvement in both areas. Being able to make radical changes to accommodation and wheelhouses is an obvious step, though it would come with increased cost to connectivity and oversight capabilities and redundancy.

So while Wärtsilä, Rolls-Royce and Kongsberg continue to titillate with futuristic videos of what can be achieved, the real transformation will be seen on vessels like the Highland Chieftan and the thousands of other workhorses of the seas.