Now more than ever, the maritime transport industry needs to revolutionise itself to overcome
the communication and information sharing challenges between industry stakeholders. This is the purpose of Sea Traffic Management (STM). STM will provide the industry with standards
and infrastructure enabling improved and new services. Ships will see the planned routes of nearby ships’ , giving navigators a more complete picture of how surrounding vessels may influence their onward voyage. Ships can easily use further value-added route advisory services to vessels, such as recommendations for avoiding congested areas or environmentally sensitive areas, as well as receiving maritime safety information.
Additionally, information exchange between vessel and port operators will improve planning and performance related to arrivals, departures and turnaround times. STM was conceived around 2009 and was chiseled out between 2013 and 2015, as part of the MONALISA 2.0 project, a consortium of 39 partners with a budget of Euro 24 million.
The consortium assessed the strengths and weaknesses of current maritime ship and transport systems, operations and interactions, and defined the STM concept and key performance indicators for four STM strategic enablers:
Port Collaborative Decision Making (Port CDM) services – increase the efficiency of port calls for all stakeholders through improved information sharing, situational awareness, optimised processes, and collaborative decision making during port calls.
Voyage Management services – support individual ships in both the planning processand during a voyage, including route planning, route exchange, and route optimisation services.
Flow Management services – support both onshore organisations and ships in optimising overall traffic flow through areas of dense traffic and areas with particular navigational challenges.
SeaSWIM (System Wide Information Management) – facilitate data sharing using a common information environment and structure (e.g. the Maritime Cloud). This ensures interoperability of STM and other services.
Further details about the project may be found at www.stmvalidation.eu
Source: STM Newsletter
