Increased situation awareness could help in accident prevention and incident analysis
Craig Eason at Lloyds List
Tuesday 11 October 2011
Vesel traffic services in the UK port of Milford Haven have been given access to one of the first three-dimensional displays to test. Operators have begun trialling the new concept, which aims to give a more accurate representation of what is happening in the tricky waters of the harbour, which is the UK’s busiest liquefied natural gas terminal and large oil terminal.
The system has been installed to establish whether its clarity of presentation and viewing versatility can enhance the operators’ situation awareness within the harbour and its approaches. One of the features is the system’s ability to combine transmitted data from a vessel and the VTS radar system to give near real-time interpretation of ship movements on the screen.
The company behind the software, Cardiff-based Geovisualization Systems, believes its technology is unique, saying it transforms a flat, two-dimensional image that needs interpretation into one that is instantly understood, as tankers are seen as tankers, tugs as tugs and all vessels with dimensions and real time movements reflected in the computer screen image.
The software company hopes the trials will show that the display will reduce the risks of radar targets being mistakenly identified and will give port controllers a view of what is happening that they have never had before. Vessel draught, tidal information and other data is also incorporated into the image on the screen.
Company founder and managing director Alastair MacDonald is aware that there is caution about over-reliance on electronic aids within the industry, but insists his system is about presenting existing data and portraying it in an easy to understand format. It takes data from a vessel’s automated identification signal to create the image. It will then use the VTS radar and monitoring system to then help identify any errors.
While the system is currently being developed to represent each individual ship more accurately, such as livery and superstructure particulars , Mr MacDonald believes it is important to use animated visualisation and to to avoid using photographic representations, as this will confuse operators who then become complacent.
Milford Haven harbour master Mark Andrews says the key will be to see if the port controllers will use the system on a regular basis, but particularly to review events. “This will definitely be of value in incident investigation,” he says.
“We now have the capacity to relive an incident in a way that cannot be achieved by a voyage data recorder and from the viewpoint of vessels that may not be equipped with VDR.”
The C-Vu system, as it is known, has been developed from studies made at Cardiff University that looked at the ways in which displays can be made more easily understood by their users.
Similar visualisation programmes have been created in the past. A few years ago the Maritime and Coastguard Agency was looking at a potential system that would give search and rescue teams a 3D view of the waters around a casualty, giving visual information such as the underwater clearance of a vessel, and even seabed topography in the future.
Mr MacDonald says such systems, once they have the data, can be used to give points of view from any perspective, from bird’s eye, to that from the bridge of a ship, even zooming under and over a vessel, giving traffic controllers unique insight into what is going on.