International Maritime Pilots’ Association (IMPA) in collaboration with its partners, the Canadian National Centre of Expertise on Maritime Pilotage (NCEMP) and the Canadian Coast Guard is rigorously exploring remote pilotage to ground-truth its feasibility, readiness, and impacts on safe navigation practices and systems.
The international study on remote pilotage study launched during Summer 2024 is specifically designed to deliver unbiased, science-based and authoritative insights into pilotage as a socio-technical system and the readiness, risks, impacts, benefits, opportunities, and prerequisites of remote pilotage. Details on the Request for Information process launched on 6 November can be found on the IMPA website. Interested manufacturers and system integrators have until 31 December 2024 to submit their proposals for participation in the study.
A crucial part of the work is to conduct trials which will take place over the next two years in three different ways to ensure a safe, thorough, yet scalable process for exploring remote pilotage in mandatory pilotage waters.
The first series of trials will take place in a simulated environment where solutions are trialed on-shore to assess their technical performance and whether they can achieve functional requirements for directing the navigation of ships in mandatory pilotage waters.
The second series of trials would take place on-board a Canadian Coast Guard vessel, which is not subjected to mandatory pilotage requirements, but that would operate in pilotage waters. The focus of these trials is to validate the technical and functional performance established in the simulated environment.
The third and final series of trials are expected to take place in a near real-life environment, on-board commercial ships operating in mandatory pilotage waters. This is the phase that will generate the insights into the readiness, risks, impacts, benefits, opportunities, and prerequisites of remote pilotage IMPA and its partners are looking for.
Manufacturers and system integrators are invited to demonstrate how their solutions to remote piloting meet the needs of the end-users – the maritime pilots. We are committed to ensure every proposal will receive a complete, fair, and transparent assessment. We want to see solutions that can help us safely find the limits of what might be possible.
… said Captain Alain Arseneault, Executive Director of the National Center of Expertise on Maritime Pilotage
In an exclusive interview, Matthew Williams, Secretary General of IMPA, explained that there is a real need in maritime to foster the pragmatic adoption of technology as a human capital multiplier and avoid adopting technology for its own sake or for the wrong reasons.
