Blog: Exploiting autonomy will require more agile approaches to regulation and safety

Recent events in aerospace and automotive sectors have served to highlight how the ever-increasing complexity of systems and their applications requires a more comprehensive approach to the development of safety related systems.

The Fourth Maritime Revolution is driven by emerging and disruptive technologies. We expect the key drivers for the coming decade to be automation, digitalization and decarbonisation leading to a future focus on connected smart ships, autonomous vessels and green shipping technologies. These technologies offer opportunities for the maritime industry to become safer and more efficient while reducing its environmental footprint. This will transform the industry, changing its more traditional trading ecosystem to a symbiotic one linking familiar innovative concepts such as the Digital Economy, Future Cities and new trading systems as part of the Fourth Maritime Revolution.

We also need to ensure that technologies we adopt are safe and this gives rise to perhaps the biggest safety challenge, we can no longer afford the time to wait for safety management systems and regulations to provide the necessary backdrop to qualifying these systems.

These changes will need to be carefully managed and appropriate regulatory and governance frameworks put in the place to support their development and the people, a key factor will be the ability of regulators and similar organisations to “match the pace” of technological change, this will include:

  • Understanding the interactions between people and intelligent systems, not just from a maintenance or control perspective, but also wider socio-economic perspectives such as the impact on skills and jobs.
  • The increasing complexity and, recognising that as we progress, elements of the system will be outside of the boundaries of a vessel.
  • Recognise and address the challenges in transitioning the industry over the coming decades from today’s solutions to this future autonomous and intelligent nirvana

Increasingly these solutions will be “software intensive systems” no longer constrained within the vessel but, as the MAS Code of Practice highlights, covering all aspects of its operation and support through life. This will require us to consider safety in a more holistic and systematic manner, it can be argued that codes and regulations serve to prevent previous incidents from happening again, learning lessons from history, but will this prevent incidents with future technology?

If we are to have the ability to exploit technology we will, we believe, require a range of new and far more agile approaches to regulation and safety, if we are to ensure that the adoption of consumer technologies (and associated social media) is controlled and managed in a way that does not compromise  safety.

The focus therefore for safety management has to move away from the procedural and analytic approach we have in today’s safety management systems towards an earlier, more iterative and cooperative approach, bringing regulators and developers together so that we no longer design it and then assess the safety implications, but adopt a more exploratory approach, working together, building on the opportunities offered by experimentation, simulation, synthetic environments and big data together with integrated tools and design environments, exploiting the information held across the enterprise – safe by design.

This will have to extend to wider safety aspects such as training and human factors, looking at exploiting the adaptability of people and supporting the changing nature of work as important ingredients in the development of safe cooperation between humans and machines.

We also need to recognise that the combination of pervasive connectivity (‘Internet of Things’), ‘big data’ and analytics, advanced manufacturing and materials is driving us towards radical change.

This change will be driven by the sheer scale, speed and impact of innovation across physical, digital, and biological spheres. Many of these technologies are being pursued by highly agile, responsive SME organisations, seen by many as the source of innovation. We need to start to change, indeed transform may be a better term, to adapt to this new future, but to do so, we have to take the safety enterprise with us. 

Implementing this new world of safety and the necessary transparency is a real leadership challenge. Changing this is not going to be simple.  It will require all of us to provide the leadership across the enterprise and it will need clear exemplars, signposting to our people how we will work in the future.

Richard Westgarth is Head of Campaigns at BMT

BMT are sponsors of the 5th Maritime Autonomous Systems Regulatory Conference