The first ship equipped to utilize future fairway services tested at Port of Kokkola
The first ship equipped with the technology of future fairway services was directed from the Port of Kokkola to the fairway on Wednesday. At the same time, the suitability of the technical arrangements for remote piloting was tested. The systems were used in parallel with normal pilotage, according to ESL Shipping's release.
ESL Shipping’s M/S Viikki transmitted real-time information about the ship’s movements and fairway conditions to Novia’s remote pilotage center in Turku.
The development of future fairway services is part of the Sea4Value Fairway program, where companies and universities are exploring the technology, data, practices, and security used in remote piloting and the maritime route of the future. The aim is to promote safer, more efficient, and sustainable maritime transport through digitalisation.
The remote piloting used a data acquisition and transmission system as well as remotage pilotage center developed by Brighthouse Intelligence and safety contours -visualization of Awake.ai. The information about the fairway traffic generated by Fintraffic VTS’s radars was transmitted to remote pilots via an open interface.
According to the Pilotage Act, remote piloting has been possible in Finland since 2019. The information and experience gathered in the Fairway project and the current experiment will be used in the implementation of the remote piloting process and technology. The experiment provided important practical experience for future development work, for example on whether the systems used worked correctly, whether the right kind of data was collected, and whether all the necessary information was transferred to the remote pilots at the right time.
Fairway project is part of the DIMECC-led Sea for Value program. Fairway includes Awake.ai, Brighthouse Intelligence, Finnpilot Pilotage, Ericsson, Meyer Turku and Haltian as industrial partners. The research is carried out by Aalto University, Novia University of Applied Sciences, Tampere University, the University of Jyväskylä and the University of Turku. In addition, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom, the Finnish Maritime Administration, ESL Shipping, Neste, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, the Finnish Shipowners Association, the ports of Rauma, Turku and Helsinki and Business Finland are involved.