Dualog and NYK sign R&D contract

Supported by Innovation Norway, the ‘Cepa Shield’ project will see the development of digitalised products and services across a testbed of 50 vessels with a view to eventually being rolled out across the company’s fleet of 250 ships.

This latest agreement follows a 2017 strategic partnership between the two companies and will bring together research and development teams to explore how to achieve maximum efficiency in the way systems between ship and shore talk to one another. The project, which will run until the end of 2021, will also generate enhanced services for Dualog’s portfolio.

When it comes to data exchange between ship and shore, cyber security is paramount. Monitoring and protecting the traffic is also crucial and the system will collect a variety of traffic information such as accessing servers from each application service.

Morten Lind-Olsen, chief executive of Dualog, said several features had already started to be delivered but additional elements were in the pipeline such as tools to simplify larger-scale distribution of software.

“What we will be achieving is controlling communication at a new level, regarding protocols and security, but also in the way we will integrate different communications equipment on board ship. We will also look at the way we want to dynamically control the bandwidth so we can undertake traffic shaping between different services,” he said.