Propulsion monitoring system for digitized ship management: Preliminary results from a case study

The paradigm of Industry 4.0 a fundamental driver of innovation in marine industry, where the new digital era will see the development of smart cyber-ships equipped with advanced automation systems that will progressively evolve towards fully autonomous vessels. Although the journey towards such technological frontier has started, most companies operating in the maritime sector still appear un-prepared to face the future scenario. In the maritime sector, in fact, empirical models and oversimplified approaches are still largely employed for the management of fleet operations. There is thus the necessity of developing and providing operative models for digitized ship management, which, based on structured information gathering and processing, can provide maritime companies with effective decision support systems in order to strengthen their value chain. This paper focuses on the context of the monitoring of the propulsion system, which is one of the most important systems of a ship and a main source of operation and support costs. A decision support system is presented involving automated data gathering and analysis procedures, to assess the correct functioning of the system and for early-detection of incipient failures. The methodology has been validated through a real case study, and the related results are discussed.