Ericsson
The maritime industry is an old and very traditional business that has not
suffer big changes in the latest hundreds of years. Major revolutions have
mainly involved the changes in building materials and propulsion systems and the
introduction of digitalization has been quite slow and cautious until now. Main
reasons for that resides on safety, adherence to standards and simplicity.
The proposition of autonomous vessels has gained a lot of traction in the latest
years in the industry and it is believed to be in the verge of a swift expansion
from automation of sub-systems, remote control and full autonomous vessels. This
has triggered the attention to the needs for connectivity, data exchange,
security and intelligence, as well as the opportunities that generates for
additional services not necessarily related to autonomy of ships.
The vessels are consisting of components that are provided by various vendors. Engines, navigation systems, cargo monitoring, etc, are examples of systems that are integrated by shipyards and in the most modern systems make use of remote services for optimization, maintenance, condition tracking, and any additional value that a manufacturer could provide to their products to differentiate or improve them with respect to their competitors. This has promoted the use of proprietary interfaces and systems that only operate with their respective vendors making difficult the integration of remote control systems and creating inefficiencies due to redundant and sometimes inaccurate information. Even when the autonomous vessel would be operating independently, the vessels would need to send information to the ground units, as there are none, or limited operators at the vessel.
Solutions where constant communication with the ground units is not practical as the bandwidth at the sea is limited when compared to wide radio coverage at the ground. In order to save expensive communication bandwidth while maximising the value of the transmitted data, alternative solutions must be looked into.
One viable solution for the problem is to improve system-level interoperability within vessel and with other vessels. This solution may consist of vessels gathering information of the data in coordinated manner to either centralized or distributed location.
Your challenge is to enable data exchange in connectivity restricted environments focusing on maritime industry. This includes several aspects to solve. Note that the description below may serve as a guidance. We don’t want to limit your creativity to find a solution to the whole picture and we will be happy with partial solutions to some of the issues presented.
For instance, multiple systems are gathering information about the weather conditions and trying to send the information to centralized location (private cloud of the manufacturer). Idea would be to gather the information in coordinated manner and to have replication of the data at the cloud.
The vessels may bypass each other at the sea within relatively close distance. This would allow vessels to have higher capacity communication link between them. At this point of time, the vessels may send public information, such as harbour maps from one to another. Alternatively, the vessels may send their private data, which is taken into the harbour by the other vessel, which is going into that direction.
Vessels may send the local information to the cloud and create so called digital twin of their data. The digital twin represents the state of the vessel, with the information that they have. The information is update, whenever new data arrives, such as sensor readings or GPS coordinates from the vessel. The digital twin may have private and public data, which can be shared based on physical or electronic contracts.
As the vessel state is represented at the cloud, algorithm in the cloud may optimize the vessel-to-vessel data sending actions. For instance, what data to send and to which vessel and when. The actions can be then send to the group of vessels, which again, executes them.
In order to be able to have common understanding of the ships configuration, interoperability is needed within the data.
- Create digital twin system that coordinates the vessel-to-vessel data sharing based on the closed harbour location (i.e. where data can be offloaded). All data can be assumed to be encrypted and keys transferred to corresponding parties based on contracts.
- Create system that allows different components of one vessel to discover information of components of the other. In other words, system components ask from each other “what data do you have” and result should be in the form that other system may understand that. These semantics can be then used with discussions between digital twins. Merging of the new data can be taken into consideration but is not mandatory.
- One example of data sharing from vessel to another is the sharing of sea bed maps from vessel to another when new ship is approaching the harbour.
- Digital twins should be able to do the pre-handshake of security to be used in real vessel-to-vessel communication.
- Discovery of Digital Twins of ships near the location. Digital twins will know the location of the ships. One task would be to create mechanism for digital twins to publish their location in the cloud and see which vessels the most potential ones would be to communicate.
- Web of Things: Semantic interoperability
- Digital twin data synchronization. Digital twin may acquire data directly from the vessel or from digital twin peers. One task could be to keep the digital twin data synchronized, no matter whether it is originated from the vessel directly or through another digital twin.
- Develop a miniature ship demonstrator that can be controlled programmatically from a raspberry pi. We provide two platform alternatives:
- Waterproof Sphero that acts as the ship motor and can be surrounded with some Styrofoam to act as the shop.
- RaspiRover Kit that can be masqueraded as ship and acts as an emulated ship (on dry land)