Short Sea Shipping remains a topic of interest in various nations with long coastlines, both as a means to offload road and rail, and to potentially reduce both harmful emissions and costs. Short Sea Shipping concepts have included both automated options and conventional ones using crewed vehicles and ships. However, vehicle technologies have advanced significantly over the last decade, particularly in the fields of electrical propulsion and automation, the later ranging from simple features such cruise control, to more complex ones such as automated parking. Increasing electrification as a vehicle standard also enables innovative technologies such as mechanum wheels. Combined, these automotive technologies may allow Short Sea Shipping automation without the extensive infrastructure changes implied by studies in the first decade of this century.
This paper describes ongoing research at UCL, examining the impacts of these increasingly widespread technologies on Short Sea Shipping. This topic has been investigated via; post-graduate group ship design projects; individual student research projects; and “exemplar” designs examining specific aspects. The paper will begin with a review of some past Short Sea Shipping concepts, before turning to how automation and vehicle technology have developed in recent years. The methods and findings of two student projects using simulation tools to investigate automation both in the port and the ship will be described. The paper will also describe an example design for a novel Ro-Ro cargo ship using a combination of transverse and vertical cargo loading, using smaller holds rather than the long, open vehicle decks on current Ro-Ro vessels.
