Shipping is the lifeblood of global economy, consequently one of the leading sources of greenhouse gases and one of the high-incident domains, due to heavy traffic especially in congested waters, therefore facing escalating pressure for safety, energy efficiency improvement and emissions reduction. Meanwhile, shipping generates extremely large amount of data in every minute, which potential, however, still remains untapped due to the involvement of enormous stakeholders and the sophistication of modern vessel design and operation. To address these challenges, VesselAI aims to develop, validate and demonstrate a unique framework to unlock the potential of extreme-scale data and advanced HPC, AI and Digital Twin technologies, and hence to promote the adoption and application of Big Data-driven innovations and solutions in maritime industry and beyond. By combining Digital Twin technologies and practices, VesselAI can efficiently fuse and assimilate huge amount of data, coming from both observations and simulations, to achieve highly accurate modelling, estimation and optimization of design and operation of ships and fleets under various dynamic conditions in near real time. Their technical enhancements and practical performance improvements are further demonstrated in 4 maritime industry pilots, tackling practical challenges for 1) global vessel traffic monitoring and management, 2) globally optimal ship energy system design, 3) short-sea autonomous shipping and 4) global fleet intelligence. VesselAI brings in a consortium of renowned actors in maritime and ICT domains, providing a perfect mix of high-level expertise in both domains and readily accessibility to huge amount of data for industry-leading research and innovation in the project. Together, VesselAI addresses the challenges of implementing extreme-scale analytics in industries and showcase how AI, cloud computing and HPC can encourage, and enable deeper digitalization in the maritime and wider industries.

The FLARE consortium comprises key stakeholders from industry, academia and policy makers, involved in ship flooding risk research as a Group for over twenty years (HARDER, SAFEDOR, GOALDS, EMSA III, eSafe), the latter three focussing on passenger ships. This offers a unique knowledge base and capability to support targeted new developments and expedite implementation. The overriding objective is to develop a Risk-Based methodology for 'live' flooding risk assessment and control, to be achieved by: - Creating an updated accident database for passenger ships and damages. Using this with support from suitably verified flooding simulation tools to develop a generic risk model for flooding incidents, accounting for collision and grounding with focus on cost-effective risk containment in emergencies. - Ensuring the risk model is generic (all incidents in one model), holistic (active and passive measures) with potential application to newbuildings and existing ships. - A risk-aware approach post-flooding incidents from susceptibility to flooding to emergency response, including mustering and abandonment in extreme flooding scenarios. - Innovative technical solutions at TRL5 in ship concepts and equipment targeting risk containment, including: crashworthiness; minimising the risk from WT doors; use of highly expandable foam post-incident; decision support for crisis management. - Developing a proposal for the revision of relevant IMO regulations towards a risk-based approach to contain and control risk in passenger ships from flooding incidents.

Delays within the maritime supply chain can lead to a “hurry-up-and-wait” syndrome of vessels sailing at a predetermined speed to their destination port to find the terminal or port not ready thus waiting at anchorage in the port area. Updated information about current states are not communicated to all partners in the different port call phases. This makes traffic of vessels waiting, entering, and departing from ports challenging. Communicating terminal or port readiness earlier to vessels allows them to adjust speed and save fuel of up to 23% of the overall voyage including the avoidance of greenhouse gas emissions. The average annual waiting time at anchorage is found to be ca. 9% for wet bulk, ca. 9% for dry bulk, ca. 7% for LPG tankers, ca. 7% for dry breakbulk, ca. 5% for container ships, and ca. 4% for LNG tankers. RoRo-vessels benefit from less traffic-condensed port entries and seaways as well as transparent real-time communication of readiness levels regarding ports and terminals as well as multi-modal hinterland transportation critical for RoRo-port departures. MISSION will develop an interoperable digital real-time-based optimization and decision support tool enabling coordinated port call operations planning and execution in terms of time, fuel consumption, environmental impact, and safety spanning the overall maritime supply chain. Stakeholders benefits from increased transparency and information sharing between shipping companies, terminals, ports, and service providers, enabled to optimize their resource and capacity planning including port’s hinterland modalities in compliance with the Maritime Labor Convention.