Digitalization in the future maritime engine control room

Abstract

The shipping industry is currently the main global transportation service for commodities today, but the shipping industry is constantly looking for new technologies to streamline their vessels to meet the increased demand that is expected to come. Today, many reports have done research on how new and more technology on the bridge, have affected the working environment towards the personnel on the bridge, where the corresponding research for the engine room seems to be insufficient. To deal with the lack of research of the engine room, we have studied how the marine engineers handle the current and future technology, where a minor survey was conducted around Swedish and Turkish marine engineers. The question posed in this thesis, aimed to examining the engine personnels' point of view on digitalization and their perspective on the development of the future in the engine room. The results from the interviews revealed that there are several challenges within a near future. One of the challenges is the knowledge gap in electricity, electronics and automation, which has led to making it increasingly difficult to carry out certain types of troubleshooting and problem solving for the engineers and with this stopping the adaptation for some technical developments. In addition, education must be modernized, and regulations are standardized according to new technology to meet the market needs in the future.