How AI tools can reduce fuel usage for maritime platforms

Artificial intelligence (AI) and data-driven tools have been proving themselves crucial to tomorrow’s warfare. Apart from improving precision and lethality for military systems, those technologies can also help to reduce logistic efforts and fuel consumption of maritime platforms in addition to ensuring the safety of crew members.

The use of algorithms enables collecting information in multiple marine areas including vessel’s performance and systems, weather and sea conditions. The analysis of this data allows for optimising operations and identifying the best speed for specific types of environments and operations.

It can also result in better support for commandants and staff and bring more agility in the decision-making process.

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Aiming at this share of the market, the Icelandic supplier Hefring Marine has developed an AI-based solution for marine platforms. Named IMAS System, the solution is on display at the SOF Week exhibition in Tampa, Florida.

It is designed to lower fuel use and carbon footprint, increase vessel lifespan, protect people and equipment, monitor vessel condition, train operators and enable crew members to correctly assess risk.

Speaking to Shephard, the company’s founder, Karl Birgir Björnsson, claimed that it can reduce wave slamming impacts by 70% and decrease fuel usage and CO2 emissions by up to 20%.

Initially developed as a research project, IMAS was planned to assess velocity and mitigate exposure of passengers and staff of high-speed vessels to high shocks and impacts that often can lead to acute and chronic injuries.

In this sense, it monitors impacts and vibrations caused as the vessel moves through the water as well as weather and sea state information.

IMAS was initially planned to assess the vessel's speed but received various upgrades. (Photo: Hefring Marine)

'From there, it scaled and developed significantly, becoming a system that is capable of making decisions for the operator and make better decisions when it comes to speed both for both safety as well as fuel economy,' Björnsson claimed. 'The system is continuously under development.'

Using the same methodology applied to the safety speed model, the supplier developed an AI-driven model that analyses the vessel's operation in different environments and creates models capable of making predictions.

The collected, calculated and forecast data, for instance, is used to optimise routes and ensure that the trip is safe and fuel efficient.

'We have built a very robust and stable platform data acquisition and analytics platform that has a hardware kit that is capable of surviving everything you throw at it,' Björnsson pointed out.

This solution is IP-protected and patentable and currently equips civilian platforms as well as the fleet of the Icelandic Search and Rescue Association.