Potential advances in living on the water or delta, harnessing the power of the oceans, and safely traversing the seas present major innovations coupled with unique challenges. How can we ensure that these systems and megastructures are safe for present use and for a future ocean climate harshened by climate change? Extreme wave loading can lead to serious structural challenges. Therefore, this research project focuses on new design techniques for complex marine systems to ensure these innovative systems are reliable and robust. With such techniques, creative design solutions can arise to meet the challenges of life and travel at sea.

READINESS will be the design of scalable, modular and fault tolerant control architectures with emphasis on autonomous navigation systems, considering the ship as a large network of interconnected subsystems. To handle the energy transition, the second research pillar will be the creation of optimisation algorithms for ship topology that make a trade-off between life cycle costs and the uncertain magnitude of ship modifications. The third pillar will be the robust design of routing methods for pipes, ducts and cables for handling efficiently any transition given the networked ship structure. Progress and updates can be followed via https://www.ship-readiness.nl/

Energy transition, smart manning, and survivability are three of the main challenges of the maritime sector. This project investigates DC power system technology that facilitates these challenges. The technology integrates energy from renewable sources and is fault tolerant, enabling to continue operation after failures from wear, calamities such as fires and floods, or missile impact. The aim is that the Dutch maritime industry develops the capability to use this technology to builds more reliable and more efficient ships with lower emissions.