About the project
Value creation via smart and autonomous maritime transport: Safe channel forexisting vessels and future autonomous ships.
Digitalisation and increased levels of autonomy in transport are expected to
take leaps forward in the coming years. This development can help in creating
safer, more efficient, sustainable, and reliable service chains to meet the
requirements for a better quality of life and global prosperity.
The development of maritime autonomy makes remote operations and remote
pilotage a possibility in a near future. Due to this development, the
navigational decision-making will become physically distributed.
Ensuring the safety of navigation and operations is of paramount importance.
Today safe navigation is a team effort consisting of the master and crew,
pilots, vessel traffic services (VTS), and aids to navigation. Controlling the
ship movement in all situations is essential and requires timely decisions as
the ships in movement cannot be stopped very fast.
The mission of the Sea4Value / Fairway (S4VF) program is to provide blueprints
towards digitalisation, service innovation and information flows in maritime
transport. Its longer term mission is in preparing for advanced autonomous
operations and navigation. A key step towards autonomous transport system is to
ensure safe, sustainable and efficient channel for ships to enter and leave
harbours. S4VF program improves the safe navigation for existing vessels and
lays foundation for autonomous vessels of the future.
S4VF is a transformative program that aims for wide societal influence by
providing concrete researchbased recommendations on regulation, business, data
usage & sharing and for standardization. In particular, the program targets on
following demonstrations and experiments, which are important milestones on the
journey towards smart and autonomous maritime transport system.
• Smart fairway navigation experiments
• ePilotage working environment (on shore) and remote pilotage experiments
Implementing the program is a central steps towards a faster, more efficient,
increasingly sustainable, in other words, smarter supply chain, which is an
essential part of a future autonomous maritime transport system.