One Sea - Autonomous Maritime Ecosystem introduced roadmaps to autonomous shipping
Top players from marine and IT-industry have teamed up to jointly develop world's first system of autonomous ships. The shared vision for the ecosystem partners is to enable fully remote controlled vessels in the Baltic Sea in three years and to achieve autonomous commercial maritime traffic by 2025.
The One Sea ecosystem, founded in 2016, represents exceptionally advanced co-creation where global leaders in their industries work to reach their joint goal of autonomous traffic. The founding partners in the One Sea – Autonomous Maritime Ecosystem are ABB, Cargotec (MacGregor and Kalmar), Ericsson, Meyer Turku, Rolls-Royce, Tieto and Wärtsilä. The association of Finnish Marine Industries supports the work, and the Finnish funding agency Tekes has invested in the ecosystem. The leader of One Sea is DIMECC.
The effort to create products and develop software and solutions to enable autonomous traffic has already been started in the participating companies. In order to promote autonomous traffic around the globe, the One Sea – Autonomous Maritime Ecosystem has taken upon itself to introduce roadmaps towards an autonomous maritime future. The roadmaps include a timeline towards 2025 and major themes to be investigated and levels of maritime autonomy – all minimising accidents, decreasing the environmental footprint of marine traffic, and advancing possibilities for efficiency improvement and new commercial ventures. The roadmaps have been created by the representatives of the companies included in the ecosystem and verified by a national Advisory board as well as an International Advisory Board.
The expected timeline for autonomous maritime traffic shows that the regulators will have to increase the pace at which new regulations are approved. The technologies are advancing at such a speed that the rules and regulations risk becoming obsolete. Fortunately, forward thinking national and international units are doing their best to enable autonomous traffic even within such a short timeline.
In addition, One Sea – Autonomous Maritime Ecosystem is currently working on the roadmaps around themes as Operational, Technical, Security, Regulatory, Traffic Control and Ethical. Roadmaps for these important themes will be introduced to the public and other maritime actors in due course. There is ongoing research and discussions with related parties regarding each of the themes and jointly they will enable commercial autonomous maritime traffic by 2025.
About Autonomous ships:
Autonomous ships are the future of modern marine traffic. Autonomous ships operate in an ecosystem, where decision-making is based on data, smart algorithms, artificial intelligence and ultimate optimisation. The possibilities autonomy and digitalisation bring to the naval environment will shape traditional marine traffic to the next level. Roles of the on-board crew, artificial intelligence and the remote-control crew ashore will be redefined and assessed. One Sea ecosystem is a smart environment, where intelligent devices and solutions read Big Data, analyse it, communicate with each other and furthermore make decisions independently. The magnitude of the benefits autonomy brings marine traffic can be calculated in costs, reliability and efficiency, while there exist multiple possibilities in creating completely new revenue streams with innovations created along the way.
