Dr. Shahreen Osman, Business Development Manager at DNV Maritime Advisory, recently addressed the digitalization challenges in the maritime industry. He emphasized that the integration of digital technologies faces serious issues that hinder the maximum utilization of these technologies. These problems are mainly due to the lack of data coherence and discontinuous systems in the industry.
Integration Challenges
In surveys conducted, integration has been recognized as one of the most prominent barriers to digitalization in maritime fleets. In fact, technology exists in the maritime industry, but these technologies have been utilized in a disjointed and heterogeneous manner. Ships have been in service for decades, and during this time, equipment, sensors, software, and communication systems are collected from various manufacturers and different generations.
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This situation, along with shore platforms, rental systems, compliance tools, and corporate IT technologies, turns any implementation into an integration project before it can become an operational project.
Fragmented Data and Trust
Dr. Osman further stated that a large volume of maritime data remains scattered among equipment suppliers and operational environments. This data often uses different naming conventions and structures. Until information becomes standardized, contextualized, and reliable, building trust will be difficult, and successful trials will not be able to scale across fleets.
Dr. Friedrich Hisse, CEO of ZERO44, also pointed to similar issues in carbon compliance. Information regarding the greenhouse gas emissions of ships may arrive late or differ between reports, requiring manual reconciliation. This situation can have real financial consequences.
According to Philip Laward from Closelink, while the maritime industry has an abundance of digital systems, many of these systems operate in isolation. Standard APIs and integrated workflows are crucial because a standalone application cannot be considered a transformation; it is merely another interface for managing people.
These challenges are particularly acute in mixed fleets. Older ships cannot be treated like newer ships designed based on modern connectivity and data architecture.
Ultimately, Dr. Timo Bimler, Vice President of Speedcast, emphasized that costs are decreasing and cloud systems are easily integrable, but a significant portion of the global fleet still operates with outdated technologies installed years ago. This can create limited upgrade paths and cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
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