The future of shipping

[vic mcclymont]

12, Agree Tony, the only proper way to automate completely would be to have redundant autonomous backup systems, which would takeover in event of the primary systems. That would be an expensive way of doing it.
At night school years ago, lecturer told us of a new super dooper telephone system installed on the east Coast of the USA. Each electronic exchange had backup from another exchange, so if one failed, the failing system would transfer its calls to another system closer to it.
One system failed, which transferred the calls to the next nearest exchange, at this point the transfer should have been seamless. Second echange started to fail and transferred load to next exchange, which failed. Ended up east coast of USA was without telephne calls for a number of hours.
Vic

[Red Lead Ted]

#11
I agree Vic, all potentially possible, however, I wonder what would happen when say for example a pipe bursts / leaks and eventually triggers the bilge pump but the pumps cant keep pace with the leak, or a fuel line ruptures and sprays fuel all over, possibly catching fire?
Picture this, you have left port and the port crew disembark and the ship sails away but 24 hours or 3 days later the heat exchangers start to fail because the sea water intakes picked up a load of crap in port, so you are a thousand miles away from land when the plant is forced to shut down. Who will sort that out.

I think such a large complex machine will eventually require a pair of human hands to physically locate the fault, repair or replace parts or whole pieces of kit.

I have experienced blackouts on ships that were supposed to be blackout proof and I guess there are plenty others on here who have been in similar situations.
I have been on a vessel with three main boiler feed pumps which all failed in succession one after the other, all caused by the same very minor failure (physically) but with major consequences.

Main boiler shutdown due to a spurious alarm, later found to be a loose connection in a terminal block which was about 2.5metres long with about 400 terminals.
The list goes on.
They would need a team of super dextrous super intelligent robots on board to trace and repair, and what would happen when their batteries ran low, where would they get a recharge if the ship was blacked out and emergency batteries all useless due to being flooded with seawater (I have experienced this also, sea water main burst and deluged main switchboard, alternator and water then cascaded down to next deck and shorted all the emergency batts).
I am finishing now as I can feel myself getting on my high horse.

Correct Tony, You also don't as i recall get gale force 10 seas to contend with in the sky, And there is no 20 30 1,000 tons of containers flying through the skies. Wont happen. Terry. .

[Fouro]

As I see it, careers at sea will no longer exist, as all future unmanned sea going vessels will be operated and controlled by 'landlubbers'

Fouro.

[Denis O'Shea]

Has no one thought of all the pirates out there having a field day, just a thought. Den

[happy daze john in oz]

Fully automated ships will come into being within a few short years with the rate of technological improvements taking place today.
Yes there may well be disasters at sea with all manner of possible breakdowns.

But consider the implications, for every 100 ships you may get one that has a problem, and maybe only a couple of times a year.
Remember modern machinery does not have the break down rate of the stuff we sailed with.

So if a ship is close enough to get some hands on board then maybe something will be done, but if not the shipping company may well decide to let the ship go.
Running costs will be so low without crew on board it may be the cheaper option.

[John Pruden]

i remember an old AB sam graham on seeing the container terminal in Singapore saying to me that is the end of our way of life? he was right.. jp

[Ivan Cloherty]

Your worst fears have already been realised.......the 'Ever Forward' 135,000dwt - 12000teu, the first deep sea autonomous vessel was delivered to her owners on 28th September this year, she will sail this month for the USA from Taiwan in fully automated mode with a monitoring crew on board. We were lucky to sail when we did, there will be nobody to sail these vessels when all the satellites go down or some hacker decides to ruin the worlds economy by disabling them for fun or just because he can.

[John Arton]

Thankfully most of us will not experience these vessels but I do wonder if the designers and builders of these ships have taken on board any of the knowledge and experience of seafarers who sailed on ships that were built prior to even the advent of thinking about having autonomous ships.
I can immediately think of two things that could cause any autonomous ship to fail.
Firstly vibration. Can they actually build a ship that does not suffer from vibration, either from its power plant or from weather induced vibration?
On my last ship, only 10 years old, the engineers could not find any mechanical fault that intermittently would cause automatic shut down of the main engine, this usually occurred at start up on leaving port.
The last time it happened I went down to the engine room to ask the chief engineer if he had figured out the problem, he was standing in front of one of the cabinets that had a circuit board in it that controlled the main engine start up procedure and I saw that the board was slightly loose on its securing mounts, just then they attempted to start up the main engine, the board moved fractionally and a hairline break appeared in one of the printed circuits, causing shut down. Tightening the securing mounting screws solved the problem immediately and fitting a replacement board cured it permanently. So my point is just how can they be 100% Shure that all the numerous computer circuit boards required to enable the autonomous ship to operate will not suffer from vibration failure even given duplication of systems.
secondly heat.
Again on one of my ships, again a less than 5 year old one with a totally enclosed and air conditioned bridge, we had a very fancy adaptive auto pilot that for some unknown reason would suddenly fail. It cost $77000 and three replacement units before we discovered that in the drive for mineturisation the makers had mounted the PCB's so close to each other that a small increase in temperature would cause the boards to expand sufficiently that the board controlling the power input would touch the casing causing the unit to short out. It would only take about 30 minutes for the board to cool down enough for it to start operating correctly again but in the time we were without it steering was by magnetic compass in NFU mode. Solutions was to fit an extra cooling fan in the cabinets holding the circuit boards.
So again my question to the designers is have they fully taken on board the extreme changes in temperature these ships will experience and how those changes will affect the computer equipment on board over long periods of time?
Rgds
J.A.

[happy daze john in oz]

Automation is here for ever now.

My neighbor works on the cranes down in Port Melbourne, sits in a cabin and controls half a dozen at a time, all fully automated.

Another company, there are four or five down there, controls it all from Malaysia, cheaper rates of pay for them.