OpenRemote - Harmonising design of remote connected maritime workstations

There is a growing trend of remotely controlling ships, drones, and other maritime equipment from land-based workplaces. These new workplaces usually consist of software and hardware provided by several independent companies. This can lead to challenges for operators who need to learn multiple different user interface languages to operate advanced safety-critical systems. Currently, there are no available design standards that guide how these technologies are integrated into user-friendly workplaces. OpenRemote aims to solve this problem by using an open innovation process where multiple industry, government, and academic actors collaborate to develop a new open-source platform for user-friendly and consistently designed land-based maritime workstations. The platform will build upon the already established OpenBridge Design System and expand it to support land-based maritime workplaces. This includes support for distributed situational awareness, providing users with a shared understanding of the situation in remote operations. It will also include support for human-automation interaction, allowing users to better integrate automation into their workflows. The project will incorporate the existing international network of maritime actors from OpenBridge into the research and development process. The work will be continuously communicated across the project consortium and the extended network. The project is developing results that will improve the usability of future land-based maritime workstations and help coordinate the development of user interfaces across all involved actors. To achieve this, the project has designed and built a workstation demonstrator at AHO (Oslo School of Architecture and Design) that supports a wide range of interaction technologies. Furthermore, we have established the first version of a user interface framework that enables the integration of software from different suppliers. This result has been made available to the project participants, and several project partners have begun integrating design concepts from the project into their own remote operation center solutions.

OpenRemote will deliver the world’s first open platform for harmonised and user-friendly design of user interfaces (UI) in multi-vendor remote maritime workstations (RMW). This platform will enable companies to independently develop systems that can coexist in integrated RMW. This will support new business opportunities by opening up RMW as a competitive platform for new innovations, while reducing costs for bringing those innovations to market. New products may include RMW UI interface integration systems, RMW applications, expansion of RMW systems outside the maritime domain. To deliver on these objectives, OpenRemote will expand current UI design knowledge on multi-vendor system integration to support distributed situational awareness and human automation interaction in the context of remote maritime operations distributed across a global network of RMWs. An open innovation process will be implemented, to concurrently develop a regulatory framework for the OpenRemote platform.