Use of AI in the Shipping Industry

Introduction

It is no doubt that AI is revolutionising the workplace. From data analytics, summarising lengthy documents and basic admin it is helping to streamline office tasks that used to take hours, to just minutes. But what is the place of AI in the shipping industry, what are the reservations and the barriers to overcome and how can we put it to best use? Just some of the questions to ponder as we embark on this topic.

Thoughts

I do find the use of AI in emailing quite funny, where you can take a few bullet points and put them into a chatbot and create an incredibly professional sounding script only for the receiver to summarise the email with their chatbot, back to your original bullet points and create a new email with their own new bullet points. We all sound very grown up and well educated with very little effort. But it almost feels like the need for professionalism dwindles, along with the need for that education in the first place.

I sometimes use chatbots myself for brainstorming and research. It’s a fantastic tool that allows you to voice your mind and feel like you have an engaging dialogue with someone that truly understands the problem. I liken it to bumping into an industry expert in the pub. They undoubtedly have some incredible insights but it all needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, when you remember they are 3-4 pints in and a lot of what they are saying is complete gobbledegook but the clarity and conviction in which they now spout this nonsense is quite compelling! Of course you can continue the conversation with them the next day while they are completely sober, if you pay consultation fees. Not unlike the paywalls that have started to go up for the latest models, now that we are all hooked on the information that the chatbots provide and the fear that if we don’t use AI the competitors will and we’ll be left behind.

The thought occurred to me during one of these brainstorming sessions, are we just becoming a hive mind, with no independent thought. There is an old fable of the tree in the woods with many faces that if you talk to it will answer any question you have, but when you begin to rely upon it, it claims another face. I find a lot of the time it either echoes my own thoughts in a flattering and convincing way or draws me back to the same conclusions each way I ask it. Is that because it’s the best answer or is it simply down to the AISO (Artificial Intelligence Search Optimisations) targeted content that makes it more likely to be discovered, understood and recommended by AI? Will we all eventually be herded to the same answers from the people (or prompters) that best know how to manipulate their content?

Speculations

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest let’s look into how this could apply in the shipping industry. From experience at sea it is safe to say that we are at least 10-15 years behind when it comes to most technology. I remember being amazed when inspecting my newly installed state of the art radar system in around 2015 that it was running on Windows ME, yes Millenium Edition the precursor to Windows XP as it was the only IMO approved hardware to run the radar system on and it takes on average 10 years for that approval process to go through.

Of course ships are no stranger to machine learning on a basic level, with adaptive autopilots and DP systems a lot of the leg work is already being completed by clever machines that analyse conditions and adapt.

There are intelligent camera systems now that can detect different types of sightings for lookout purposes, integrate with the radar and acquire a plot and alert the officer of the watch. But will we get to the point where the officer of the watch themselves can be a droid with an AI brain entirely replacing the human? Probably eventually. But we are in no danger for a while.

The marine industry has a healthy dose of scepticism for technology, the mark I eyeball always retaining the final say in gathering information. I think the warning sign will be true driverless cars, outside of the wild west of America. From that point we have about 15 years before we’ll be out of the chair.

But there are implementations that can certainly improve the way things are done before we get to that point, here’s a list of examples to name a few:

In SMS implementation:

• Identifying changes to maritime regulations and flagging which company procedures might need updating

• Incident investigations: Analysing years of incident and near-miss reports to identify recurring causes and trends

• Risk assessments and control measures

Maintenance and engineering:

• Trend analysis

• Cross checking maintenance manuals and PMS creation

• Break throughs in engine design

Voyage optimisation and fuel efficiency:

• Weather, tides, currents and sea conditions

• Vessel loading and trim

• Historical fuel consumption at different speeds

• Port arrival times and berth availability

• Passenger comfort and machinery limitations

Crew management:

• Rostering

• Rest hour monitoring

AI-assisted navigation and lookout:

• Smart lookout systems and full bridge integration

The Future

The future is encouraging and if used in the the right way, AI can enhance all elements of operations and safety for the industry. The next task for us all is to find the balance and do our best not to become another face on the tree...

Disclaimer

You will be please to know that no AI was used in the creation of this article. As a result it is highly opinionated, largely unresearched and hoatching with grammatical errors; but you do get to hear the true voice of an industry expert that’s almost completely sober!