In a bid to harness the digital transformation taking place in the shipping industry, Finnish technology group Wärtsilä announced introduction of a Smart Marine Ecosystem. The company’s ultimate goal is to enable sustainable societies with smart technologies.
The basis of ecosystem thinking strategy is eliminating major inefficiencies that marine industry players are facing and that impose a significant negative impact on business operations, which are overcapacity, inadequate port-to-port fuel efficiency, and time wasted waiting when entering ports and other high traffic areas.
Namely, Wärtsilä sees four primary forces that will re-shape the industry:
- Shared capacity will improve fill rates and reduce unit costs;
- Big Data analytics will optimise both operations and energy management;
- Intelligent Vessels will enable automated and optimised processes; and
- Smart ports will result in smoother and faster port operations.
“This means that we are looking at the smartest way of operating and maintaining assets, as well as optimising performance in order to have the safest, and most environmentally sound and efficient operating profiles. In the future, we shall be looking more holistically at customer business operations. Instead of optimising a single vessel, we may be optimising a fleet, or even the customer’s business. In the long term, vessel-as-a-service becomes the ultimate means of providing asset and lifecycle management services,” says Pierpaolo Barbone, President, Wärtsilä Services.
Recently, the company, in collaboration with the vessel owner, tested the remote controlling of a ship’s operations by satellite from a distance of 8000 kilometres. The test was carried out using standard bandwidth, and no land-based technology was used for communications between the vessel and the remote operator work station.
Wärtsilä has also already opened one Digital Acceleration Centre (DAC), located in Helsinki, to speed up innovation with new business models, including the industry’s most advanced intelligent vessel and other ground-breaking projects. A second DAC is scheduled to open in Singapore in December, and during 2018 two more will be opened in Central Europe and North America.
