COSCO Shipping Aries is the first ever container ship to receive Lloyd’s Register’s (LR) cyber-enabled ship descriptive note Cyber AL3 Secure Perform for its energy management system.
The 20,000 TEU ship was built by Nantong COSCO KHI Ship Engineering Co.
The ship complies with the revised version of LR's cyber-enabled ships (CES) ShipRight procedure, issued in December 2017. AL3 is defined by LR as “cyber access for autonomous/remote monitoring and control (onboard permission is required, and onboard override is possible)”.
COSCO is now hoping to apply LR’s CES descriptive notes to some of their other vessels.
LR innovation strategy and research director Luis Benito told Container Shipping & Trade “The significance here is that operators have a way of ensuring that their energy management system integrates with the rest of the systems on the ship with no side effects. Therefore, it checks that it works in harmony with the rest of the ship and has a foundation level of [cyber security]. Clients rely on such systems for business decisions, so it is important that they can rely on the data being cyber secure.”
He said the AL3 note has additional significance as it means the energy management system is certified to operate in an autonomous way without human intervention. “Once the owner sets the parameters, the system is left to operate the ship within these thresholds automatically and will deliver what it needs to without human intervention.”
However, the human is kept in the loop, as the system is set to allow crew to override it if needed, then reset it to be autonomous again.
Mr Benito expanded “This is so new to everyone, including ourselves. Many ships have been using energy management systems for decades, but what is new is that in the past no one paid attention to the risks of having a connected ship streaming data.”
But, as he explained, there is now an industry realisation that ship operators should look at the risk of data streaming and connected assets.
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