PurSense: Operation monitoring and decision support for purse seiners

Today's fishing vessels are complicated and gives the skipper many choices related to how the vessel is operated. Typical choices are which engines to run and at what speed, how the energy is distributed, the use of electric motors for propulsion or direct coupling, propeller pitch etc. Therefore, the shipowners Eros, Ervik & Sævik, Herøyhav and Kings Bay along with SINTEF Fisheries and Aquaculture have started the research project PurSense. This is made possible by the support from the Norwegian Research Council and The Norwegian Seafood Research Fund. This project has developed tools to help the skipper to operate the vessel as efficiently as possible. This will both reduce fuel consumption and vessel emissions of CO2 and NOX. This is therefore beneficial for both the company and the environment. The project has developed tools that can provide skipper advice on how the vessel should run, based on the analysis of previous operations. The developed methods are generic and can be used further for other vessel categories. This can be both in fisheries, offshore and other maritime industries. The developed tools are installed on four purse seiners for further testing and incremental improvements.

The proposed project aims to develop decision support software that will aid the crew on board purse seiners in improving the energy efficiency of their fishing operations. The suggestions made by the software will be based on statistical and model-based calculations. Such calculations require input in the form of of sensor data collected from a multitude of machinery components and systems on board the vessel. Today, such sensor data is often not available, either because the equipment is not sufficientl y instrumented or because the data is limited to use in the components' own control and monitoring systems. Components that do communicate operational data do so using a plethora of different, often proprietary, protocols, formats and interfaces. An integ ral part of this project will therefore be to develop a generic hardware and software infrastructure capable of collecting and distributing data from systems across the ship and making them available in a standardised manner.