Ship-borne Internet to Benefit Marine OEMs

In 2017, the Danish Maritime Authority will contribute to a pilot project on the development and testing of a system that collects real-time data from various components on board ships.

The Aalborg-based company GateHouse is behind the pilot project. A number of other companies and the Danish Maritime Authority will contribute to the testing of the new technology. They include shipowners such as Uni-Tankers and other companies such as Logimatic and two major Danish equipment manufacturers.

In practice, the solution consists of a number of sensors that measure the condition of the ship's equipment and record emissions from the ship. All the sensor-generated information is collected and continuously transmitted to shore (in real-time), where stakeholders with access to the data can use the information for various purposes, including ongoing optimisation of the machinery, more efficient maintenance, ongoing fuel consumption optimisation and continuous emission monitoring.

For the marine equipment industry it is, in other words, all about ’Condition Based Maintenance’, i.e. helping improve the services offered to shipowners and ensuring optimum operation and use of on-board systems. For the authorities, it is especially interesting to be able to continuously monitor whether, for example, ships' sulphur and NOx emissions comply with regulatory limits.

Deputy Director General Troels Blicher Danielsen from the Danish Maritime Authority says, ”In the near future, many ships will be on-line all the time, exactly as is already the case on land. This presents a business opportunity for innovative companies in Blue Denmark, and the Danish Maritime Authority wants to contribute to this by taking part in this pilot project. If we can simultaneously demonstrate that the technology makes it easier to continuously monitor ships' emissions of, for example, sulphur, then it could be a big step towards more effective enforcement."

For a couple of years, the Danish Maritime Authority has been working on Big Data to and from ships under the auspices of the very ambitious, EU-funded project EfficienSea2. The intention is to couple the experience gained from the new pilot project where data are transmitted live to shore with elements of the EfficienSea2 project.