Lloyd’s Register Class Regime Goes Digital

Lloyd’s Register (LR), the world’s first classification society, pioneers the transformation of the class regime for the digital age with announcement of the first ever digital assurance framework: ‘Digital Compliance’

A press release from LR said that it has developed the first ever data-driven compliance framework for the marine and offshore industry: ‘Digital Compliance’.

The increasing use and advancement of digital twins1 presents a significant opportunity to marine and offshore operators in terms of improving aspects of their operational performance and maintenance regimes, as well as allowing for greater transparency and repeatability in demonstrating compliance with internal and external requirements.

LR has developed this industry-first digital assurance framework, ‘Digital Compliance’ in collaboration with leading industry partners and to respond to the growing interest within the industry.

The framework is applied through a series of defined levels with the system provider and the operator. This builds confidence in a digital twin that is used within a digital health management (DHM) system2. LR will assess and give recognition to, the capabilities of a system provider to create an asset-specific twin. This in turn provides confidence to the operator to trust the insight generated by the digital health management system through the physical asset’s operational lifetime.

LR will build the confidence level in the DHM system from the commissioning stage, to ultimately awarding of the descriptive note; ‘Digital Twin LIVE’ – which will grant credit for survey activity through demonstrated functioning of the twin over time.

LR Marine and Offshore Director, Nick Brown, commented: “Digital Compliance is the framework that sets the foundation for what we call ‘Digital Class’. Digital Class is the vision we have, where advanced technology and data-driven techniques will allow our clients to demonstrate compliance with Class requirements in the future, remotely, periodically and/or continuously and we are actively engaging with flags to discuss how we can extend this to statutory aspects.”

He continued, “Demonstrating that Class requirements are met through data-driven techniques will allow us to better target Class services where they are needed most, by having a better understanding of an asset’s health over its lifetime. Digital Class will also allow clients to submit Class relevant data either continuously or periodically to demonstrate compliance, leading to a more targeted and focussed approach to physical survey.”