Ship’s dashboard, Control Tower and Fleet Management.

Maritime industry is inmerse into the fourth industrial revolution and new advances are improving the efficiency and the security of the industry to levels very difficult to foreseen just 10 years ago. But before going to far let’s be focus in a tool that is the mind of many shipowners and ready to use onboard: Ship’s Dashboard and Fleet Management, some times also called “Control Tower”.

The objetive of the Ship Dashboard is to provide a single access-point in order to gathered the most important information of the ship. Specially information to manage and optimise its security and general performance.

And on the shore we will have the Fleet Management tool or “Control Tower”, that recibes the most relevant information from the ships together with information from other sources like; weather reports, currents, waves, trafic control, harbour information, bunkering, ship maintenance services, and a very long list that allow a better handle of the fleet.

What data is need it in a #Dashboard?

This is a very interesting question, the excess of information could be as bad as the lack of it therefore the general recommendation will be to hadle the data necesary to generate useful information. Take into account that information is what we need, data is only the bricks that constitute the information but many times the information alone do not help.

What to do with the data?

Store and secure the data on board: vessels records, sensorization, logbook, etc.
To do a preliminary filtering and quality control of the data.
To perform a teorethical (and whenever is useful an Artificial Intellegence) quality control of the data.
Less data volumen and more substantial “KNOWLEDGE”
Collect External data from different sources: weather, waves, currents, traffif control, etc.
Search for a deep technical understanding of the main requirements in order to be able to <mark>”connect”</mark> the different variables : weather, fuel, speed, payload, etc.. and fix the main objetives: fuel saving, stick to the schedule, confortability, harbor operation optimization, security, etc…
Display Real time contro.l
Continuous registration.
Execute Alarms.
Report and execute preventive actions.