Within the global shipping there is an increased environmental focus. Over the past few years several new legislation has been released, both global via the IMO, and also from EU side. Think in this respect of the EU MRV, IMO DCS, but also the EEXI and CII regulations, as well as the EU ETS. All these new regulations relate to reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of vessels, and start with a proper, accurate and detailed reporting of fuel consumption, and insight in the actual operational ship performance.

VAF is well known for the fuel viscosity sensors which are provided to global seagoing vessels, and are at the heart of many vessel fuel booster units. Next to the viscosity sensors VAF has a large portfolio and installed base of fuel flow meters (both positive displacement and Coriolis type), shaft power meters, propeller thrust sensors, and high frequency data collection systems, for seagoing vessels.

In order to support the global shipping operators with fulfilment of the above mentioned new global environmental legislation, VAF has over the past years evolved from a pure sensor supplier towards a total solution supplier. New environmental regulations demand for a more detailed and accurate ship propulsion performance measurement and reporting, resulting in improvement measures.

On one hand this drives for more on board measurements and sensors. On the other hand it demands for a shift of crew manual (noon report) ship performance reporting towards automated high frequency data collection systems, which provides real time information to both crew as well as office performance departments.

IVY® Propulsion Performance Solution
The VAF offered portfolio nowadays consists, next to the well known viscosity-, fuel-, and shaft power meters, also of onboard data collection systems to gather automatically high frequent data from all propulsion performance related sensors. With this VAF IVY® high frequent data collection system, automatically all ship propulsion performance KPI’s are determined for both onboard crew, as well for office performance analysts, as this data is send to shore and is available in a cloud environment. Further integration into customers additional cloud solutions is secured via dedicated API’s. Optimal flexibility is therewith provided towards customer requests.

Collection of data of the relevant sensors on board of various ships of a fleet usually results in unmanageably large amounts of data, so called Big Data. Nonetheless, the most important and difficult step is to refine the vast amount of raw measurement data into the relevant data points. This enriched data is critical for KPIs on which decisions for ship performance optimization can be based. Big Data enrichment is automatically performed by IVY® and is based on the use of strong mathematical algorithms, which have been developed by VAF over many years. These mathematical algorithms of IVY® provide clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) on which the performance of the various ships and the fleet can easily be tracked.

With the powerful analysis by IVY®, visualizing raw sensor data and making difficult, time consuming data analysis is no longer necessary. IVY® enriches and then analyses data into KPIs which are presented to the ship and fleet performance decision maker through a powerful visualization dashboard. These KPIs enable optimization of operational costs, energy efficiency, fuel consumption, emissions and maintenance. If, based on the displayed KPIs, there is a necessity for further analysis of the performance of the individual ship or fleet, IVY® also offers the possibility to zoom in on the individual sensor signals resulting in a KPI. This enables the user to perform more in depth analysis of a possible change in a trend.

The IVY®, Propulsion Performance Management system provides therewith also a relevant overview of the performance of the fleet as a whole. It enables monitoring and comparing the performance of the entire fleet of ships, as well as on individual ship level. IVY® automatically collects all data, performs powerful analyses and visualizes dedicated Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and provides insight into full graphical display of sensor data. In addition, sister ships’ performance can easily be compared in the fleet overview.

To support with being compliant the latest environmental regulations (like EEXI and CII) and to further improve on ship propulsion performance, greenhouse gas reductions, and fuel savings, the VAF solution portfolio is ready with accurate sensors, high frequency data collection systems, onboard and office dashboards, and with cloud data solutions.