Digitalisations endless opportunities

Q: The impact of digitisation and digitalisation is being felt widely within the marine and offshore industry. How would you define MAN Energy Solution’s vision of how the digital revolution will shape the industry?

The opportunities of digital are almost endless. The data that can now be accessed, enables an unprecedented optimization of the whole transport logistics chain or offshore E&P operation that will result in safer, more economical and environmentally sound operations. Maybe we soon see the ship that itself monitors its engine room and engages the technical support it needs where it makes sense along its voyage? Our challenge is the complex industry structure and diverse business models, which makes both creation of integrated digital solutions as well as aligning economic incentives difficult. We are driving the development from the engine room and propulsion plan, working together with other industry providers and our customers.

Q: Could you perhaps discuss how you have incorporated measures to improve cyber resilience within CEON?

MAN CEON was designed with the ability to continuously deliver to our customers despite adverse cyber events. We have taken a strong approach on information security, business continuity and recovery both at the MAN-CEON edge, and the MAN-CEON cloud.

Q: Digitization is often reduced to digital security but the exciting opportunities are related to developing improved services for your customers. Could you give some idea about what these advances will look like?

For us, security and availability are the table stakes, the must-haves, to enable us to provide the real value. As an example, we have developed MAN PrimeServ Assist. This is our new, proactive service solution that combines state-of-the-art connectivity technology to collect machine and process data, advanced analytics and 24/7 MAN expertise. Using our digital platform MAN CEON, PrimeServ Assist’s experts are able to continuously monitor and analyze live data on running machines, diagnosing anomalies and notifying on-site engineers with valuable operational, performance and maintenance advice. Our customers have access to the same information and analytics, providing a powerful collaboration environment for optimizing their asset performance.

Q: MAN is committed to developing the digitization of marine engines, via initiatives such as the Digital Cooperation Network. Can you unpack your plans around data collection, diagnosis and visualization around engine performance?

Our commitment is to digitization of the engines and the adjacent systems in order to secure availability, efficiency and low emissions of the whole propulsion and power generation system on board. This includes on-board and onshore applications. It also includes co-operation with other players in the industry. We believe our customers will benefit if we as OEMs can in a secure and managed way share data and infrastructure between systems, based on customer contracts. This is part of our near-term roadmap.

Q: How do you think this will impact engine maintenance and product development in the future, for example?

The bottom line from the new generation of digital services will be less unplanned maintenance, increased availability and improved efficiency. The operating models can also change, because technical support of all levels will be closer and faster, virtually and physically. R&D can design their products to better match the actual, measured operating conditions, and contribute more effectively to preventing and resolving technical anomalies.

Q: What is your position around the need for standardisation and the development of common protocols around engine digitalisation?

We see increased need for standardisation, driven by more providers seeing the benefits of being able to exchange data. Turning to some of the technical issues around data communication in Maritime, we will see and support:

– a transition from serial based communication to Ethernet as a standard for physical layers and the data Link layers; and,

– a transition to standardise Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol.

If we shift our focus to the level of signal and data, we see a strong need for further ISO developed standards to common tag names in the Maritime industry to harmonize collaboration between OEMs.