There is a growing trend of remotely operating ships, drones, and other maritime equipment from land-based workplaces. These new workplaces often consist of software and hardware provided by several independent companies. This can create challenges for operators who must learn different user interface languages to operate advanced, safety-critical systems. At present, there are no design standards that regulate how these technologies should be integrated into user-friendly workplaces.
OpenRemote aims to address this challenge through an open innovation process where industry, government, and academia collaborate to develop a new open-source platform for user-friendly and consistent land-based maritime workstations. The platform builds on the established OpenBridge Design System and extends it to support land-based maritime workplaces. It will include, among other things, support for distributed situation awareness, giving users a shared understanding of remote operations, as well as support for human–automation interaction, making it easier to integrate automation into work processes. The work involves the existing international network of maritime stakeholders from OpenBridge, and the research and development process is continuously shared both within the project consortium and with the extended network.
The project develops results that will improve the usability of future land-based maritime workplaces and contribute to coordinating the development of user interfaces across stakeholders. To achieve this, the project has designed and built a workplace demonstrator at AHO that supports a wide range of interaction technologies. This demonstrator has been updated into a new and improved version after testing. In addition, a comprehensive user interface concept has been developed, demonstrating how components from OpenBridge can be used to realize consistent design across systems in a remote operations center.
Furthermore, a second version of an integration framework for user interfaces has been established. This framework enables software from different suppliers to be combined into a shared workplace and manages, among other things, fleet control and rules for the composition of information components. Concepts have also been developed for integrating AI support in user interfaces, icon libraries for autonomous systems, standardized sequence components for autonomous routes, as well as an AR framework for video overlays for remote operations, in collaboration with the OpenAR project.
The results have been made available to the project’s participants. Parts of the integration framework have been published under Creative Commons through OpenBridge. Several project partners have already started implementing design concepts from the project in their own 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.
