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MAROFF-2-Maritim virksomhet og offsh-2

Vessel data and sharing for the machine economy

Alternative title: Fartøydata og deling for maskinøkonomien

Awarded: NOK 6.2 mill.

A common data infrastructure, Unified Hosting Service (UHS), for collection, analysis and sharing of data has been implemented by Telenor Maritime and was made available to DNV. Further, an MQTT event bus was chosen for sharing between microservices on the UHS, and methods for authentication and data access control has been established by TM. DNV has explored various 'Distributed Ledger Technologies' (DLTs) that fulfill the project requirements wrt. safeguarding data integrity and making sure data cannot be manipulated without being discovered. Early phase local implementations has been explored using IOTA and Ethereum, however, from the wide range of available public DLTs, Ethereum 2.0 (not yet released) and VeChain appear to be most applicable due to sustainability and smart contract capabilities. VeChain was chosen and demonstrator applications developed and implemented on UHS using data collected on the same infrastructure. Altogether 6 microservices were developed that interact on-board(on edge) and on land (in the cloud) and these are the core of the demonstrator. To utilise the service, data must be made available on-board for batch hashing (e.g. every 10 minutes) and late users can verify tamperfree data upon need. The project has demonstrated that the proposed tamperproofing methodology could be implemented and will work for critical data collected in a microservice based data infrastructure of which UHS is an example. Further it is shown that a verification service can be used both on-board within the data infrastructure as well as on land, e.g. in the cloud with various end users of data. Also verification checks can be automated during data analysis.

We have acheived a demonstrated HW/SW infrastructure that show that microservices can be deployed to a vessel for data collection and analysis, and that a tamperproofing methodology consisting of a set of independent microservices can access collected data immediately after collection, create a hash and publish to blockchain. Further it has been shown that this can be used for verifying original data for a newly developed vessel technical index calculation to increase trust in the underlying data and by extension between the relevant stakeholders, e.g. ship owner and charterer. Market research has also identified emissions data as particularly suited for tamperproofing due to these data being 'monetized' when shipping enters into EU ETS in 2024. In the longer term, more data will be 'monetized', i.e. data driven services will be increasingly common, and hence increasing the need for high integrity and high levels of trust.

Today, each vendor or vessel owner collecting, storing and analysing data, needs to install and maintain the necessary HW and SW for this purpose, and each needs to arrange for access to vessel communications systems for ship-to-shore data transfer. Such solutions results in high complexity and low reliability and resource efficiency. This project will utilize Kubernetes technology as part of a unified hosting environment for managing onboard microservice applications utilising Docker containers and a tight integration with a global connectivity solution which can serve the maritime industry. Further, there is presently no way of verifying truthfulness of large amounts of data, as it may be manipulated voluntary or involuntary, by systems or by human interaction, by whomever has legal or illegal access to a particular system. Situations may arise where pressure, financial or otherwise, may compromise otherwise trustworthy stakeholders or individuals. Also, data integrity and quality may be affected by unintended technical tampering occurring during the multi-stage ship-to-shore data transfer. As the importance of data increases, the current situation cannot continue. There is a need to ensure and verify that data is not manipulated, fabricated or deleted. This project will develop a methodology which can utilize the containerised data infrastructure to ensure that data collected in various Docker containers are not tampered with, and allow stakeholders to verify that data has not been manipulated in any way. Combined, a containerized common data infrastructure for vessel microservices and the ability to verify the truthfulness of collected data, represents the substrate necessary for building a machine-to-machine economy in the maritime industry. This project will demonstrate that it is feasible to develop and integrate the different technologies required to enable the machine to machine economy in the maritime industry.

Funding scheme:

MAROFF-2-Maritim virksomhet og offsh-2