| Project Detail |
Better support for navigators to improve safety
Approximately 1 000 severe maritime accidents occur every year in the European maritime fleet, resulting in loss of life onboard, pollution, fires, collisions or grounding. Navigational accidents are dominant in these statistics, the root causes being technological, organisational or human errors. To mitigate this issue, the EU-funded OCEAN project will support mariners by improving their overall situational awareness relating to navigational hazards and the presence of marine mammals as the basis for better decision-making and wildlife preservation. The project is aimed at ships of any size and can be integrated with existing systems and technologies. Key outputs include the creation of the European Navigational Hazard infrastructure to collect observations and distribute warnings, as well as the Evasive Maneuvering Agent, the 4D-Situation Awareness Display and the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) ships.
The OCEAN project approach is to contribute to the mitigation of navigational accidents by supporting the navigators to do an even better job than they do presently. Such support does not only relate to an ‘on-the-spot’ enhancement of navigational awareness – including the presence of marine mammals and floating containers – or an improved performance of evasive manoeuvring and other mitigating actions. The project will go both deeper and wider, to identify and suggest amendments or improvements in the most pertinent factors that may contribute to events becoming accidents: training, technical, human or organisational factors, operational constraints, processes and procedures, commercial pressures or structural issues like shortcomings in rules and regulations. From an implementation perspective, the OCEAN project will develop new design methods and operational processes, as well as integrating existing technologies to provide novel and improved functionalities. A key convergence point is the overall navigation situation assessment made by the operator, and the project aims at providing an integrated and designed-for-the-purpose presentation of near-field threats and navigational hinderances. The project outputs will include an Evasive Manoeuvring Agent, intended to work in tandem with existing ship systems, continuously assessing navigational safety with respect to grounding or collision with other ships, fixed structures or other threats, and the visualization of advanced manoeuvring prediction. OCEAN will suggest the creation of a European Navigational Hazard infrastructure to collect, process and distribute data relating to the presence of marine mammals and floating containers. Further innovations comprise input to upcoming and revised international standards for maritime communications and practical methods to design maritime instruments and devices, all of which will be demonstrated in consolidated scenarios. |
