Posted on May 2, 2016
The marine engine technology is on its way to move from pure mechanical to more and more electronic controlled engines. Engines equipped with common rail and dual fuel systems are available today and spark ignited gas engines are upcoming fast. With this change, a lot of improvements to engine performance and emissions are achieved. On the other hand it can bring some challenges to the operator / crew in understanding the principles and new ways in performing troubleshooting and fault finding in case of alarms and diagnostics. Besides engines, also the vessels are becoming more electronic and connected. There are many opportunities for the marine industry to take advantage of newly available data and increase asset and operational performance. Other industries like Aerospace have moved this way over the past 10-20 years and have demonstrated significant gains in reliability, safety, efficiency and productivity – all of which could be applied to the marine industry as a whole and to the dredging sectors specifically.
Remote Monitoring has been available to the maritime industry for a while but not the value creating analytics technology that creates customer value out of raw data. It has been reported a lot that customers and operators are suffering from each and every system manufacturer trying to bring their own remote system to the vessel. It drives the clear need to the industry to supply integrated solutions that have the capability to communicate with several systems and take values from these, compare to others and create intelligent, analyzed and valuable data.
As these kinds of new technologies will bring some challenges it will on the other hand give the possibilities leading to the present day of how technology, specifically analytics and connectivity, are starting to impact the marine industry. The potential value can be significant, with fuel savings, increased uptime (days of production), optimized maintenance, reduced failures, associated repair costs, increased transparency into safety, greater productivity, streamlined operations, decreased costs of compliance administration, etc. This paper will go through some examples of how data analytics have been and can be used to create value for vessel owners and operators.
