Specialists in marine technology from the world-over gathered for a conference on Smart Ship Technology last week at Royal Institution of Naval Architects (RINA headquarters) in London. Around 30 industry and academic professionals attended the conference, which was set to discuss how developments in both information and communication technologies (ITC) will enable fundamental changes to the way ships are designed and operated.
While the agenda had to be shortened by a day due to an evacuation of the Strand area, the delegates still had time to discuss papers on subjects as diverse as Real World Autonomy for Autonomous Surface Vehicles, Exploiting Machine Learning for Ship Systems Anomaly Detection and Healthiness Forecasting. Of particular interest to the superyacht industry were the discussions about using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to carry out intelligent maintenance, reduce vessel downtime, and improve general vessel design.
However, also considered was the idea was that while there are still technical issues to overcome in order to take full advantage of ITC advancements, it would be the non-technical hurdles (such as economic and legal considerations) that will ultimately define the rate of this progress.
RINA‘s next event will be based around high-performance yacht design. Held in March, it will aim to showcase the latest developments in yacht research from around the globe.
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