Nautical Institute joins OCEAN navigation project

The project is focused on enhancing operator awareness in navigation, to reduce the frequency of severe accidents like collision and grounding, to mitigate ship-strike risks to marine mammals, and to mitigate the risk presented by floating obstacles to ships.

The OCEAN consortium, coordinated by Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, includes 13 partner organizations across seven different European countries from the industry, academia, NGOs and end users. The project was awarded funding by Horizon Europe and launched in October 2022, and it is due to run until 2025.

The OCEAN consortium will address the most pertinent factors that may contribute to events becoming accidents: training, technical, human or organisational factors, operational constraints, processes and procedures, commercial pressures, and will recommend improvements and amendments to regulations, standards and bridge equipment design approaches.

OCEAN seeks to enhance navigational awareness “on the spot” and to improve the performance of evasive manoeuvring to avoid collision with near-field threats. The project will deliver and demonstrate several human centred innovations. For example, the 4D Situation Awareness Display which will be developed in the OCEAN project will improve the visualisation of navigational hazards, integrating current bridge information systems with marine mammal and lost floating containers detection and tracking capacity specifically developed by the project.

Going further, the project will design and implement a European navigational hazard data infrastructure to feed multi-source observations and hazard predictions relating to floating containers and large aggregations of marine mammals into the existing distributed maritime warning infrastructure. OCEAN seeks to transfer this data ecosystem to relevant European organisations for deployment and maintenance.

Around 3,000 maritime incidents occur every year in the European maritime fleet. 28% of these accidents are categorised as severe or very severe accidents, resulting in the loss of life onboard, pollution, fire, collisions or grounding. Navigational accidents are dominant in these statistics according to the European Maritime Safety Agency, be it for cargo, passenger or service ships.

David Patraiko, FNI, Director of Projects at The Nautical Institute, said: “Focusing on the Human Element and how good decisions are made to prevent accidents is at the heart of The Nautical Institute’s work so we are thrilled to be partnering with this project and look forward to playing a significant role in improving safety for ships, the effectiveness of seafarers and the marine environment in which they operate.”