Bridge officers’ operational experiences with electronic chart display and information systems on ships

In this paper, authors suggest an improvement in the electronic chart display and information system handling. Electronic nautical charts provide significant benefits to maritime navigation as a real time navigation system and all updates are important. This paper analyses the electronic chart use experiences on board ships. A questionnaire and survey were used so as to ascertain and corroborate the existing problems with corrections and maintenance of electronic charts on ships, and reliability of the systems was calculated. The survey results have shown that ship’s officers had serious problems with ECDIS systems which were difficult to solve during ship’s operation. A survey was done which showed that a significant percentage of the surveyed bridge officers and captains had problems with ECDIS system operation, such as operation stoppage due to different reasons. They did not always report failures of these systems while having continued to operate ECDIS. The reliability of those systems was also calculated and it resulted 0.916 or 91.6%. Compared to results of previous similar researches done by other scientists, the results of this research show an improvement in the ECDIS handling. It was concluded that a proper action was needed toward finding the solution to the future chart corrections procedure through remote monitoring and maintenance. The study results emphasized that taking action was necessary in the interest of safety protection on ships, with particular attention to be paid to better safety of navigation, of life, and of potential environmental pollution due to this type of information system failures. The results obtained by this study represent a good starting point for future researches in the field