Towards Autonomous Shipping: Benefits and Challenges in the Field of Information Technology and Telecommunication

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to an overview of components of an onboard control system of an autonomous ship. This system controls and operates the ship. Therefore, this system needs to be able to analyze the ship’s state, predict its future development and analyze the consequences of its own decisions. The paper focuses on software aspects of the onboard control system, not the hardware. The paper provides an overview of technologies that can be used to implement the components of such a system responsible for planning new routes, handling the ship during the voyage, ensuring its seaworthiness and safety during the voyage, monitoring an autonomous ship from an onshore control centre, ensuring the robustness of the onboard control system, and collective operations of multiple autonomous ships. The paper describes benefits the maritime industry would gain from deploying some of the technologies developed for autonomous ships on ordinary, human-controlled ships. The paper also describes some challenges, especially in the field of automatic decision and reasoning, arising from the emergence of autonomous and smart ships. The main contribution of the paper is that it summarizes existing research in different areas of autonomous ship technology.

Keywords

• information technology (it)
• telecommunication
• autonomous shipping
• maritime information technology
• communication system
• onboard control system
• human-controlled ships
• autonomous ship technology