The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formalized a new international collaboration with maritime industry leaders through the MIT Maritime Consortium (MC), established during a signing ceremony at MIT, according to the company's release.
The consortium aims to address climate-harming emissions in the maritime shipping industry and support environmentally friendly operations in line with the decarbonization goals of the International Maritime Organization.
The maritime sector transports around 11 billion tons of goods annually, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume, with a merchant shipping fleet of approximately 110,000 vessels.
The consortium’s founding members include the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), Capital Clean Energy Carriers Corp., and HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. Innovation members are Foresight-Group, Navios Maritime Partners L.P., Singapore Maritime Institute, and Dorian LPG.
MIT contributors span the Center for Ocean Engineering within the Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT Sea Grant, and other units.
The MC, co-led by Themis Sapsis, the William Koch Professor of Marine Technology and director of MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering, and Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences and director of IDSS, will focus on research into nuclear propulsion systems tailored to commercial shipping’s techno-economic needs, the economic and environmental feasibility of alternative fuels, data-driven algorithms and evaluation criteria for autonomous maritime platforms, cyber-physical situational awareness, anomaly detection, and 3D printing for onboard manufacturing.