Within the global shipping there is an increased environmental focus. ERIK VAN BALLEGOOIJEN looks at how the decarbonisation of the shipping industry has influenced the strategy of sensor makers.

Over the past few years much 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.

In order to support the global shipping operators with fulfilment of the new global environmental legislation, leading sensor makers have over the past years evolved from a pure sensor suppliers towards a total solution suppliers. New environmental regulations demand 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.

Leading sensor makers nowadays have shifted from the supply of sensors to onboard data collection systems, to gather automatically high frequent data from all propulsion performance related sensors. With high frequent data collection systems, automatically all ship propulsion performance [Key Performance Indicators] 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 various ships in 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 optimisation can be based.

Big Data enrichment is automatically performed by custom software solutions and is based on the use of strong mathematical algorithms, which have been developed by the market over many years. These mathematical algorithms of these software systems provide clear KPIs on which the performance of the various ships and the fleet can easily be tracked.

With the powerful analysis by the software system, visualising raw sensor data and making difficult, time consuming data analysis is no longer necessary. These software systems enrich and then analyse data into KPIs which are presented to the ship and fleet performance decision maker through a powerful visualisation dashboard.

These KPIs enable optimisation 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, software solutions 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 software solution, in a specific 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. They automatically collect all data, perform powerful analyses and visualise dedicated Key Performance Indicators and provides insight into full graphical display of sensor data. In addition, sister ships’ performance can easily be compared in the fleet overview.