Digital Initiatives, Infrastructures and Data Ecosystems in the Maritime Sector

Efficiency, performance and monitoring of vessels becomes of paramount importance around the globe. Assets security, vessels efficiency, new directives and legislation with regard to emissions quality and many others, urge the global maritime industry to take the right initiatives and make the appropriate investments to develop data ecosystems, that over time, if used intelligently, coherently and consistently, will allow owners and managers to reap tangible benefits such as, among others, significant cost savings, better vessel management and longer vessel life span. As of today, most shipowners and related stakeholders face huge challenges when it comes to data collection, processing, streaming, sharing and storage. Relevant data, if any, is isolated in distinct silos, in spurious and inconsistent formats with little or non-existent interconnectivity between such silos or storage mechanisms. In effect, to face the new challenging landscape, a fresh mindset and an open-minded approach is required. The paper uses data and relevant building blocks, related to vessel performance, assets tracking, route planning, engine monitoring, fuel consumptions, emissions quality, vessels tracking, performance alarms and notifications; that is a wide variety of data modules and reporting tools, that eventually serve pure reporting, real-time monitoring and visualization objectives; but also some additional, more powerful modules being used for analytics and strategic decision making. Such modules can leverage on historical data being captured over prolonged time periods, in the various interrelated data sources and by the relevant data collectors and, if deployed effectively, to construct supervised, unsupervised or even semi-supervised machine learning models. Eventually, such models will enable the various stakeholders in this domain, to achieve successful assignments related to predictions, regressions, classification and clustering. In effect, apart from pure vessel geolocation tracking capabilities, the above modules and tools will allow any shipowner to log-in and see how, a specific vessel under consideration does, in terms of performance and efficiency, in specific weather, geological and regional conditions. In addition to that, more advanced modules, for instance, might warn ship owners about the benefits of a potential hull maintenance or cleaning, give insights on engine efficiency and recommend actions or even provide indications or predictions of future likely delays in reaching at the port of destination. Among other things, this data collection and storage, in such a digitalization platform (will) allows the ongoing building-up of insights, knowledge and technical expertise associated to (optimized) vessels performance and all related functionalities as stated elsewhere. As the variety, veracity, volume and quality of the collected data, across the board, will be gradually enriched, enhanced and improved over time, allowing relevant stakeholders to gain real benefits, such as potentially reduced costs triggered by better and proactive vessels management, from such initiatives that might look and sound meaningless at the very beginning. The Paper builds upon the empirical evidence and relevant data associated to Tototheo Maritime’s, Digital Control Room and its associated Maritime Digitalization Platform that do provide, not only a state-of-the-art platform that facilitates visualization and snap-shot reporting functionalities but also modules upon which machin