The UK’s Nautical Institute will participate in the EU-backed OCEAN project launched this month
The OCEAN project is focused on enhancing operator awareness in navigation, to reduce the frequency of severe accidents such as collisions and groundings, ship-strike risks to marine mammals and risks posed by floating obstacles.
Close to 3,000 maritime incidents occur every year across the European maritime fleet, with 28% of these classed as ’severe’ or ’very severe’ accidents.
The OCEAN project will contribute to an improved understanding of root causes of accidents including training, technical, human or organisational factors, operational constraints, processes and procedures or commercial pressures, and will recommend improvements and amendments to regulations, standards and bridge equipment designs.
The consortium is co-ordinated by Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and includes 13 partner organisations across Norway, Greece, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland and the UK, spanning industry, academia, NGOs and end users. Participants include a coastal administration, a ship operator, maritime safety and transport researchers, marine mammal ecology and conservation experts, companies specialised in maritime information systems and sensors, a professional organisation, a risk and safety management organisation, and data infrastructure, data fusion and satellite imaging specialists.
In particular, the consortium seeks to enhance navigational awareness ’on the spot’ and to improve the performance of evasive manoeuvring to avoid collisions with near-field threats. The project will deliver and demonstrate several innovations. For example, the 4D situation awareness display which will be developed in the OCEAN project will improve the visualisation of navigational hazards, integrating current bridge information systems with marine mammal and lost floating containers detection and tracking capacity specifically developed by the project.
In addition, the project will design and implement a European navigational hazard data infrastructure to feed multi-source observations and hazard predictions relating to floating containers and large aggregations of marine mammals into the existing distributed maritime warning infrastructure.
The OCEAN project launches October 2022 and runs for three years. It receives funding from Horizon Europe, the European Union’s research and innovation programme.
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