A new tool to help navigation officers learn from their actions has the potential to vastly improve ship safety without undermining the role of often victimised ships’ crews.
Singapore-based Safe Lanes, a training consultancy, is a winner of the innovation award at this year’s Lloyd’s List Asia Awards. It won thanks to its recently launched Quantum V analytical tool.
This is a service that offers a near real-time opportunity to give bridge teams feedback of their decision-making. It takes bridge data from the voyage data recorder and can assess the processes that occur during an officer’s navigation watch.
The learnings can be fed back to the ship operator, not as a blame tool (all too often we hear of voyage analysis, particularly in an incident, being used to blame the bridge officers), but as a learning tool that can offer some real benefit to officers.
Accidents still happen at sea despite tougher regulations and what are expected to be high levels of training and education. However, officers often get very little feedback from their actions unless there is a very serious incident.
Most bridge audits are signalled in advance and often do not replicate the very job of navigating a ship, offering very little assessment of the decisions being made. Quantum V offers an opportunity to change that, enhancing what are static audits and appraisals. The VDR records all the electrical data from the bridge, including speed over ground, speed through the water, heading and actual course over the ground, what settings the radar and other navigational tools are set on, along with audio from the bridge.
Quantum V takes all of this, apart from the audio, and can determine near misses and opportunities where decision-making can be sharpened, say its founders. A proprietary software analysis tool can identify and compare behavioural patterns and places where shortcuts are being made, thus pointing to areas of further training.
Information is fed back to the ship operators who, one hopes, find a way to constructively enhance the skills of the crew.
This tool is therefore unique in being able to offer feedback on near-miss incidents that may not need to be reported but are nonetheless good examples to learn from.
Safe Lanes claims the cost of the system is about $4 per ship per day. At the moment the system relies on the recorded VDR data being sent to the company, where it takes a few days to make the analysis.
With higher levels of communication, as we see increasingly connected ships, this could have the potential of moving to real-time analysis.
The benefit of this is faster feedback to the officers shortly after their watch finishes. The memory of the watch is fresh in the officer’s mind, so any learning can be further enhanced in a positive way.
The future of the unmanned ship in international trade is many decades away; any tool that allows officers a chance to engage in self-learning from their navigation duties without reverting to a blame game should be welcomed.
Did you subscribe for our daily newsletter?
It’s Free! Click here to Subscribe!
Source: Lloyds List
