Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OCEAN (Operator-Centered Enhancement of Awareness in Navigation)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-03-31
The OCEAN project is focused on enhancing operator awareness in navigation, to reduce the frequency of severe accidents like collision and grounding, to mitigate ship-strike risks to marine mammals, and to mitigate the risk presented by floating obstacles to ships.
The project will contribute to an improved understanding of accident root causes, and will strive to reduce the resulting human, environmental and economic losses through socio-technical innovations supporting ship navigators.
Around 3.000 maritime incidents occur every year in the European maritime fleet. 28% of these accidents are categorised as severe or very severe accidents, resulting in the loss of life onboard, pollution, fire, collisions or grounding. Navigational accidents are dominant in these statistics according to the European Maritime Safety Agency, be it for cargo, passenger or service ships.
The OCEAN project ambition is to contribute to the mitigation of navigational accidents by supporting the navigators to do an even better job than they do presently. The OCEAN consortium will address the most pertinent factors that may contribute to events becoming accidents: training, technical, human or organisational factors, operational constraints, processes and procedures, commercial pressures, and will recommend improvements and amendments to regulations, standards and bridge equipment design approaches.
OCEAN seeks to enhance navigational awareness “on the spot” and to improve the performance of evasive manoeuvring to avoid collision with near-field threats.
The project will contribute to an improved understanding of accident root causes, and will strive to reduce the resulting human, environmental and economic losses through socio-technical innovations supporting ship navigators.
Around 3.000 maritime incidents occur every year in the European maritime fleet. 28% of these accidents are categorised as severe or very severe accidents, resulting in the loss of life onboard, pollution, fire, collisions or grounding. Navigational accidents are dominant in these statistics according to the European Maritime Safety Agency, be it for cargo, passenger or service ships.
The OCEAN project ambition is to contribute to the mitigation of navigational accidents by supporting the navigators to do an even better job than they do presently. The OCEAN consortium will address the most pertinent factors that may contribute to events becoming accidents: training, technical, human or organisational factors, operational constraints, processes and procedures, commercial pressures, and will recommend improvements and amendments to regulations, standards and bridge equipment design approaches.
OCEAN seeks to enhance navigational awareness “on the spot” and to improve the performance of evasive manoeuvring to avoid collision with near-field threats.
The OCEAN project was launched in October 2022 and will run for 3 years. Co-funded by Horizon Europe and the European Union’s research and innovation programme, as well as the UKRI for the two UK partners, the consortium of 13 members represents 7 European countries, Norway, Greece, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland and UK, all located on major European coastal regions. Members include a coastal administration, a ship operator, maritime safety and transport researchers, marine mammal ecology and conservation experts, companies specialised in maritime information systems and sensors, a professional organisation, a risk and safety management organisation, as well as data infrastructure, data fusion and satellite imaging specialists.
In the first half of the project, the work agenda has been much at the foundational level. Literature studies and fundamental/enabling research has taken place across the more social-science oriented work packages, spanning subject areas ranging from the anatomy of undesired maritime incidents, and how these are seen as the results of complex chains of events, to the understanding of decision-making while in command of a large ship, leaning towards the naturalistic rather than the normative, to the insights into how organizations involved in development of navigational equipment is dealing with user needs and the context-of-use, ‘in real life’. Other facets include KPIs for the assessment and grading, and an investigation into good maritime training. 7 training videos have bee produced, and are free-to-use by anyone. In the more technically part of the project, initial definitions and basic design have taken place. The bits, pieces and components of the overall OCEAN data ecosystem are at this stage materializing and current assessment is that the overall framework of the OCEAN project will succeed. Many, like the OCEAN reporting app, the passive acoustic monitoring system, the automatic AI-based satellite image analysis function and the European Navigational Hazard Infrastructure (ENHI), are already in early stages of testing, and early data flows have been validated. The feasibility of connecting the OCEAN Evasive Manoeuvring Agent (EMA) to new and existing ship systems mostly using pre-existing shipboard interfaces and data streams has been demonstrated, and equally, tapping into the mandatory and standardized alert escalation mechanism on ships is by now both validated and demonstrated. The 4D-SAD display, targeting to be the first custom-designed maritime display focusing exclusively on providing and maintaining operator situational awareness, is also taking shape. The design is following a human-centred approach (HCD), and the collaborative effort between the ‘product’ designer and the project HF advisory is highly interesting from two different perspectives. Not only will the final product be confirmed to have the qualities designed for through validation with end-users, being a success in itself and demonstrating the power of HCD, following the work from a process perspective gives very valuable insights into the ‘cans’ and ‘cant’s’ in a modern industrial setting, and will eventually serve to guide other companies and organizations in the maritime equipment industry towards a practical way of using HCD.
In the first half of the project, the work agenda has been much at the foundational level. Literature studies and fundamental/enabling research has taken place across the more social-science oriented work packages, spanning subject areas ranging from the anatomy of undesired maritime incidents, and how these are seen as the results of complex chains of events, to the understanding of decision-making while in command of a large ship, leaning towards the naturalistic rather than the normative, to the insights into how organizations involved in development of navigational equipment is dealing with user needs and the context-of-use, ‘in real life’. Other facets include KPIs for the assessment and grading, and an investigation into good maritime training. 7 training videos have bee produced, and are free-to-use by anyone. In the more technically part of the project, initial definitions and basic design have taken place. The bits, pieces and components of the overall OCEAN data ecosystem are at this stage materializing and current assessment is that the overall framework of the OCEAN project will succeed. Many, like the OCEAN reporting app, the passive acoustic monitoring system, the automatic AI-based satellite image analysis function and the European Navigational Hazard Infrastructure (ENHI), are already in early stages of testing, and early data flows have been validated. The feasibility of connecting the OCEAN Evasive Manoeuvring Agent (EMA) to new and existing ship systems mostly using pre-existing shipboard interfaces and data streams has been demonstrated, and equally, tapping into the mandatory and standardized alert escalation mechanism on ships is by now both validated and demonstrated. The 4D-SAD display, targeting to be the first custom-designed maritime display focusing exclusively on providing and maintaining operator situational awareness, is also taking shape. The design is following a human-centred approach (HCD), and the collaborative effort between the ‘product’ designer and the project HF advisory is highly interesting from two different perspectives. Not only will the final product be confirmed to have the qualities designed for through validation with end-users, being a success in itself and demonstrating the power of HCD, following the work from a process perspective gives very valuable insights into the ‘cans’ and ‘cant’s’ in a modern industrial setting, and will eventually serve to guide other companies and organizations in the maritime equipment industry towards a practical way of using HCD.
The project will deliver and demonstrate several human centred innovations. For example, the 4D Situation Awareness Display which will be developed in the OCEAN project will improve the visualisation of navigational hazards, integrating current bridge information systems with marine mammal and lost floating containers detection and tracking capacity specifically developed by the project.