To improve safety at sea and support the trend of using more autonomous digital technologies, this work investigates human factors when building a holistic anomaly detection system, utilizing detection and interaction methods augmenting human perception, meaning mimicking the process where the ship's crew is patrolling the machinery rooms, looking for anomalies such as leaks, unusual smell, sound, vibrations, temperatures, air quality, oddly placed objects, or any other kind of anomaly, and making obvious or even intuitive assumptions about the condition, the risks, and potential hazardous situations, of the overall installation.
The maritime industry is going through a great transition as there are simultaneous trends to utilize higher level of technology, which brings more complexity, together with increased autonomy, which is driven both from economic factors and from scarcity of skilled crew. Complex machinery needs to be monitored very thoroughly, since failure of e.g., main energy and propulsion power production may be catastrophic or even fatal both for the people onboard and for the affected environment. Shipping is reported to have a relatively poor safety record. A white paper claims that the safety record for the maritime industry is approximately 20 times worse than the average onshore worker and about five times worse than the construction industry (Huntley-Playle;Busshoff;& Quraishi, 2021). Increased autonomous functionality is thought to eliminate many possibilities for human errors, which should lead to less safety incidents overall.
The number of shipping casualties or incidents is reported to remain rather consistent around 3000 reports per year, even though the number of total losses has declined significantly. Based on the analysis of 244 451 insurance claims between January 1st, 2017, and December 31st, 2021, 12 % is related to machinery breakdown (Allianz Global AGCS, 2023). The European Maritime Safety Agency reports a total number of marine casualties and incidents of 23,814 from 2014 to 2022, and they see a slight downward trend during the last year. Their statistics show that a staggering majority, 80.7% of all contributing factors are related to human element (EMSA, 2023). A potential strategy within the sector aims at increasing automation, to protect the workforce and ensure business continuity. Among the solutions are mentioned remote piloting and increasingly autonomous functions on ships (UNCTAD, 2020).
