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Clouds on the horizon for shipping’s digital journey President Maritme of Marlink on digitalisaton
Clouds on the horizon for shipping’s digital journey
A FULL EMBRACE OF DIGITALISATION WILL REQUIRE NEW APPROACHES TO OVERCOMING LATENCY AND GREATER USE OF STANDARDISED SYSTEMS. WE KNOW THAT DIGITALISATION WILL HAVE A TRANSFORMATIVE EFFECT ON THE MARITIME INDUSTRY AND THAT IT HAS THE POTENTIAL TO IMPROVE EVERYTHING FROM OPERATIONAL SAFETY AND PORT CALL OPTIMISATION TO ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE.
WORDS BY TORE MORTEN OLSEN, PRESIDENT MARITIME OF MARLINK. ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF MARLINK.
What is not always appreciated is that it is difcult to achieve a revoluton in the way that people, assets, and data are managed using the technology of a decade ago. Just as Moore’s Law has been superseded with more powerful processing, communicatons technology has also evolved.
Seeking solutions
Maritme communicaton difers from terrestrial communicatons, principally because of its inherent latency, or delay between data being sent and its arrival. All networks have challenges of how to terminate the trafc with as low latency as
The trend in data analytics is once again moving inexorably towards the cloud. But maritime satellite services operate with a level of latency that makes cloudbased computing and applications challenging.
possible and an increase in throughput does not by itself solve the latency issue, because the journey is stll into space and back. How we overcome this challenge requires a combinaton of engineering, hardware, and sofware expertse.
The trend in data analytcs is once again moving inexorably towards the cloud. But maritme satellite services operate with a level of latency that makes cloud-based computng and applicatons challenging. Even the use of LEO constellatons does not eliminate the problem, because even though the distance between earth and satellites is smaller, the journey from the vessel across the network to an end point is stll long compared to terrestrial services. Our experience in smart hybrid networks suggests there are mitgatons, including a form of bufering that smooths out the end user experience by manipulatng the journey of the data to enable it to be delivered as a complete package even if the process is interrupted.
Service quality is key
Network performance can be impacted for beter or worse by a number of factors: orbital spread of the available satellites, the likelihood of congeston, and the number of overlapping beams in areas of densest trafc. One-of problems such as blockages to the signal from ship superstructure are a fact of life but shouldn’t be a reason to incur higher costs or sacrifce performance. For vessel operators, getng the service they require will mean comparing their optons in detail and creatng a benchmark that gives them the certainty they need. The absolute number of combinaton of satellites may not be decisive above a certain number, but the orbital spread and number of overlapping beams makes a critcal diference for service quality.
The core diferentator is whether they are using a guaranteed service or one that provides ‘best efort’. For some low-level applicaton usage, best efort will perform adequately, but when communicatons become critcal, an uptme and throughput guarantee will be required as the industry moves towards more complex solutons. There are diferent categories of urgency and owners need to plan and prioritse the trafc in a partcular data stream. Some OT systems may only need to ping once in 24 hours, others will send more frequent updates, and systems must also be able to cope with unforeseen events that need to take bandwidth priority. Achieving a new level of operatonal efciency, certainty, and security on the basis of “this has worked untl now” may not be enough for the new technologies coming into play. A long-term connectvity partner will need to do more than connect one USER to the other; value added services go well beyond basic user applicatons to backbone systems such as automatc updatng to more emergent technologies like routeing data around sofware-defned networks.
Different thinking required
The trend towards cloud-based computng and applicatons also suggests that the industry can only take full advantage of digitalisaton by moving towards the use of standardised sofware tools rather than the traditonal maritme-specifc systems that have emerged independently over tme. This is partcularly true of cloud services which tend to employ disparate standards, which need to converge for the maritme cloud to work to its full potental. The sofware, monitoring, and performance tools that shipping has used untl now can contnue to be used over hybrid networks. This challenge lies ahead if more demand for cloud computng pushes latency further up the agenda. Being able to connect to shore and transmit data should be considered ‘business as usual’ and storing and processing data in cloud based corporate systems will require us to think diferently. These challenges must be considered as part of the digitalisaton story and the shipping industry needs to understand the limitatons and challenges in coming closer to an ‘onshore experience’ in the near future.
The physics of satellite connectvity might be against standard shore-based oferings for applicatons like Microsof Ofce 365 or Citrix to maritme users, but with proper expertse and consideratons, we can optmise every possible parameter to build a good user experience, making standardised tools work within the framework of the maritme communicatons market.
