Using AI to help ship’s staff manage ship operations
4th November 2020, marks a celebration of all things Engineering ‘This is Engineering Day’! We would love to take this opportunity to briefly update you on a concept our highly skilled engineering team are working on.
As a marine electrical engineering company, SeaKing has developed platforms and systems to help ship’s staff manage ship operations. We monitor, gather, filter and present data for ship’s crew to make decisions and then help them to implement. SeaKing believes that AI can assist in the interpretation of this data to support decision making.
AI has recently become a more practical and accessible solution because technology developed for game playing has been exploited by AI technology. Graphic Processing Units (GPU) can be used to simulate neurons and with open source software these can be used to build ‘minds’. SeaKing has experience of building these platforms in a marinized package.
Our first project is to build on published research around using ‘minds’ to optimise ship parameters to reduce fuel consumption. Ship’s fuel usage varies with many factors and research shows that the optimum settings are either not known or not adopted in many cases. Fuel savings of around 15% are predicted. SeaKing’s unique proposition is to take their existing expertise in accessing ship’s data and use that with their tried and trusted hardware platforms to implement AI analysis on board the ship and present the information using existing marine display technology.
This type of AI solution ‘learns’ each ship and can successively get better at it’s job. SeaKing will be able to build a valuable library of AI solutions so that solutions learnt on one type of ship can be quickly transferred to another and start to optimise for that ship.
The system is capable of being extended into other areas. One area is in learning to recognise when the ship’s systems are working well and look for signs that motors, pumps or other equipment is starting to fail and raising a predictive alarm with benefits for the safety, operation and efficiency of the vessel.
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the process of using computers to perform tasks usually requiring human intelligence. The power to transform the way things work has led to it being called “the new electricity”
R&D led by Malcolm Stein, Communications Engineering Development Manager
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