Safe and Resilient Control Systems for Autonomous Ships

The use of digital solutions can contribute to enabling sustainable maritime transport. To ensure a successful green transition, we must leverage the opportunities provided by technology, such as decision support systems and autonomous ships, for energy savings and emission reductions. However, increased digitalization also introduces new safety challenges. The complex cause-effect relationships in these systems become less visible and harder to understand for both operators and developers. Traditionally, human operators have been crucial in helping complex systems avoid accidents by interpreting situations and adapting to unforeseen changes. With increased digitalization and autonomy, operators' situational awareness may diminish, reducing their ability to handle unexpected situations. The project was officially launched with a digital kickoff meeting alongside our industry partners, Kongsberg Maritime and DNV. In October 2024, we will hold our first physical project meeting. Additionally, all three PhD candidates have been hired and are currently in the initial phases of their work, and we expect significant progress in the coming months. Our overarching goal is to develop control structures that can manage unexpected disruptions, deviations, and failures, while making safe decisions under uncertainty. The focus is on autonomous ships, where we aim to develop advanced control and decision-making systems. These systems will be able to predict, detect, and understand hazardous situations, enabling safe navigation and decision-making even under uncertain conditions. Together with Kongsberg Maritime and DNV, we will demonstrate this technology through case studies on autonomous ships. SAFECOAST removes bottlenecks hindering innovation in digitalization and the green transition, driving maritime systems towards a safer and more sustainable future.

Traditionally, human operators have been the main source of resilience in complex systems with their ability to interpret situations, adapt to changes, respond to disruptions to prevent accidents, and learn from experience. When computer control systems take over tasks and responsibilities from human operators, much of this resilience may be lost, since existing computer control systems are currently not able to adapt and solve problems outside their specification and design intent. The main objective of the SafeCoast project is to enable the development of highly resilient autonomous control architectures capable of coping with unstructured environments, handling sudden disturbances, deviations, failures, and making safe decisions under uncertainty. The project furthermore develops methods for understanding and assuring safe behavior of autonomous systems and their interactions with traditional systems. This is achieved by developing i) a framework for enhanced situation awareness by using online automatic hazard detection to anticipate, detect and understand system hazards; ii) a framework for online control architecture redesign that enables autonomous systems to adapt to disturbances and hazardous situations; and 3) a framework for safety assurance of adaptive and self-reconfigurable autonomous control architectures. Research results will be implemented and demonstrated in two case studies where autonomous ships are considered. An interdisciplinary approach if employed to address the research challenges from the fields of both control engineering and safety science.