Planning the voyage in IP1

The digitising of area information will give immediate benefits to the on-board planning process of a voyage. The implemented standardised route format, REXF, together with digitised area information and MSI (Maritime Safety Information), reduces much manual work, and increases the quality of the verification of routes. The possibility to send the route to shore-side operators for verification increases the operational safety especially in sensitive sea areas.

 

Planning the voyage in IP2

In the second Improvement phase, the planning process performed in the shipping company, is now integrated with the supporting services provided by SeaSwim. The global actor catalogue implemented in IP1, can now be used for authorising access to different parts of the information about the voyage, which is publicised in SeaSwim. As the planning of the voyage progresses, the information owner can choose to publicise parts of the information, which can be notified to a subscribing collaborator (e.g. Agent, Port). The process saves much time and effort compared to today’s email, telex and fax to different collaborators.

Existing supporting services provided by VTS, route optimising service providers etc., can now provide enhanced, more capable services by having access to all needed information about the voyage, ship and digitised area information.

Planning the voyage in IP3

Verification of routes is now being done using multiple information sources covering the whole voyage port-to-port, and various STM-services are a naturally integrated part of the shipping companies planning systems. New actors have emerged creating more complex optimisation support, based on the availability of global statistical data for most areas of the world. The possibility for an information owner to assign access to different actors, have now become a simple, and fully integrated task in their daily IT-systems.

Area managers, such as VTS and SRS, monitoring tasks have become more automated since traffic anomalies can be automatically identified, and verification of which ship has received what information can be tracked ad the ships are equipped with more advanced tools based on high data availability. This enables larger areas than today to be monitored by the same number of operators leading to safety increases in larger areas.