There is a growing need to bring ship designers in contact with cargo owners to improve the operational design of vessels. According to Fridtjof Rohde, from Icelandic data analytics and performance company Marorka, shipping industry could do well to bring cargo owners closer into the design loop when new tonnage is being considered.
Mr Rohde was giving the keynote speech at one of the Fathom Disruptive Talks at this year’s Nor-Shipping in Oslo. Rohde began his keynote address on this topic by describing a “knowledge circle” or “close cycle” for shipowners made up of operational experience, target setting and the design of a newbuilding. During the design phase of a vessel, an owner fixes most of his costs for the next 20 or 30 years. There is very little that can be done to reduce operating expenses once the design is fixed but many owners chose to ignore this close cycle, and fail to feed data from the operational experience and target setting portion of the knowledge loop back into a new design.
Compared to the aviation industry, there are many more players in the shipping chain between cargo, or end customer, and designer, Rohde explained. He says that typically you may have a chain made up of cargo, charterer, shipmanager, owner, yard and finally designer, with, in many cases, a broker between each of these steps. So the designer ends up being extremely far away from the target, i.e. the cargo, which is the reason for building the vessel in the first place.
Former ship designer Rohde explained that in his 15 years in front of the drawing board, he had only one experience of having close contact with the end user, which in this case was a shipowner who was also the cargo owner. Spending a bit more time, effort and money on the design phase, and actively using data from past operational experience, led to a 5%-to-8% emissions reduction for the ship in question.
Nowadays companies such as Marorka can automate and augment this process by harvesting the operational data from a ship and feeding it back to the designer of a newbuilding so he or she can see how the owner’s vessels were used in practice and how they actually performed. But an owner still has to be a willing participant in this process for the design to be optimal.
Can data create a knowledge loop to enable shipbuilders to replicate aviation’s design and operational levels?
Fridtjof Rohde, CSO, Marorka (pictured) gave the keynote address in this discussion and was joined by panel members Jenny N Braat, managing director, Danish Maritime; Sasan Mameghani, founder, Maindeck; and Kristinn Aspelund, co-founder and CEO, Ankeri.
The debate
Jenny N. Braat of Danish Maritime raised the point of the “competition barrier” to the sharing of data, and the further complication of the large number of equipment and software suppliers with products onboard a vessel. She would like to see a situation where there is a joint benefit in sharing data.
On the question of the validity of data, Sasan Mameghani of Maindeck believes that the sharing process can help in determining whether the information coming off onboard sensors is good enough to use. It is possible to share the data anonymously, he added, thereby reassuring owners and adding to the overall industry knowledge base.
Kristinn Aspelund of Ankeri believes it is vitally important to start a visualisation process so that people such as shipowners can be educated onthe benefits to be had from sharing data. Engineers are very good with the technical know-how, he says, but they don’t alway communicate the bigger picture.
But Fridtjof Rohde believes something is changing in the industry. He says people are now coming to him and asking “how can I visualise my data and how can I share it?”.
But he added that trust is vital if this process is to be successful.
The Video
Brendan Bell
Fathom-News.com
