Amazon cloud will help shipbuilder develop autonomous shipping

A leading shipbuilder plans to utilise a cloud-based platform to enhance ship construction, improve after-market customer services and develop autonomous ships.

South Korea-headquartered Samsung Heavy Industries has turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for part of the digitalisation platform it offers shipowners. AWS will host Samsung Heavy Industries' online platform and enable collection and analysis of vessel performance and condition-based monitoring data.

Samsung said it will use the data analysis to advance an autonomous shipping platform and to improve ship design and construction. The company will also share its analysis with its shipowner clients to enhance their vessels' operations.

Samsung intends to develop a fleet of self-piloting large container ships, gas carriers and floating production systems. To achieve this, it will use AWS’ services including machine learning, augmented reality and virtual reality, analytics, databases, cloud computing and data storage to expand its smart shipping capabilities. 

Samsung will use the Amazon Redshift tool to build a system that shipowners will be able to use to analyse ship performance. AWS machine learning services, including Amazon Polly and Amazon Lex, will provide real-time alerts to vessel operators about the condition of their ships.

Amazon Sumerian will create a virtual replica of the ship cockpit for land-based training and simulations. AWS CloudTrail will integrate systems for all vessel-related data.

Ship data will be transmitted to the AWS cloud using a mixture of cellular networks and satellite communications. To facilitate this, Samsung has signed an agreement with communications providers, such as Inmarsat, for access to satellite coverage around the world.

Samsung has also started using BMT Smart’s modular vessel performance monitoring solution, which collects analogue and serial data feeds before transferring this information to BMT’s cloud-based service.