The ongoing and future development might bring changes to the maritime business, and this question will show the collected opinions of the interviewees.
Q20. How AS will change the maritime business? Individual opinions:
“Cost saving will be achieved”. “Changes in ships design, materials”.
“Uberisation or consolidation of maritime transports”. “More space for cargo less for crew”.
“Increased safety”.
“Removing of brokers, intermediates as a lot of surveys will disappear”. “More risk bade approach and on-line audits and inspections”.
“Changes in firefighting and emergency equipment and procedures”. “Crew will spend much more times in simulators”.
“Jobs will be lost, but new ones will be created and roles adjusted”.
Sharma et al (2019) and Porathe (2019) raises the point that many of the manual routines will be automated in the future, and job descriptions will be changed as a result.
Q21. How will the technology change the behaviour in the future? Individual comments on how the technology will change the behaviour:
“There will be shift of control from ship to shore”.
“The interaction and communication with small vessels will be a big challenge”. “The technology becomes faster and faster and we need to adapt”.
“We need tools for faster adaptation to the changes”.
“A big advantage being ashore compared to on board from a stress point of view. “Connecting to experts easier when working from shore”.
“Mooring operations will be automatically”.
“The big picture need to be approved and accepted by the society”.
Research references made in Q7, Q10, Q11, and Q16 support most of the above comments.
4.4 Summary
All the questions are supporting each other and some even overlapping looking at the answers. All of the interviewed are highly educated, with a long and wide experience from the maritime sector. The average number of degrees is 1.56 / interlocutor, which shows that life-long learning is adopted and knowledge is of interest. The representation is approximately 33% business, 33% authorities and 33% educational and the majority are working internationally, despite their home office is in a certain country.
The majority of the interlocutors said that the definitions and terminology need to be clear. The word Autonomous is quite undefined and some people use this for everything or synonymously, which might lead to misunderstanding.
Certain things came up several times in the thesis, some already addressed in the research and others might be in progress, but limited amount of public information available. The three mostly mentioned things are:
1) Legislation and regulatory. 2) More IT knowledge is needed. 3) Education and training.
Regarding the first point, legislation and regulatory, the common understanding is that adjustment is needed and the changing of the rules moves slowly. More IT knowledge will be needed in the future is brought up by several researchers, and also in the questionnaire. There is quite few public articles on education and training need to change and they are mainly pointing out that changes are needed, but the deeper research on how is missing. The automation will lead to jobs being lost, but new ones will be created and roles and responsibilities need to be updated.
5 Discussion
I will reflect with some personal opinions in this chapter. It is amazing how much information is available and many skilled people working in the Maritime sector, especially those who have a long experience have a good and deep knowledge about things together with a huge network.
Even if the future is difficult to forecast, it is quite clear that new technologies are being developed all the time, including more automation and integrated systems. History has shown that when big industrial companies decide to develop something it is difficult to stop, which means that the number of autonomous vessels and concepts will increase, it is more a question of the timeline.
Looking from an educational and training perspective, they need to be developed, the question is how? In my view changing the STCW related courses will be too slow, some courses might be developed towards the way of delivering them from a digitalisation and life-long learning perspective. This means that we need to think out of the box and find other creative solutions which gradually might develop into major changes to the STCW courses in a longer perspective.
NOVIA has already shown an alternative way of bringing in new education via the Master’s program. The advantage with them is that course modules are not STCW related and can easily be replaced to support new things that are coming up. How to finance such programs is a thing which needs to be solved.
The Finnish approach, allowing up to 30 sea days from enough simulator exercises, I believe is a good path to follow and further develop. The argument for this is that we see that new technologies are coming up and they could be tested in the future simulators. Maybe accident scenarios could be built in the exercises and learning from them in a secured environment could reduce future risks. In general an increased use of simulators would support the technical development, assuming the simulators are developed accordingly.