Assessment of the Technological Maturity of Marine Autonomous Surface Ships

Marine Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) are gaining increasing attention due to the potential benefits of improving safety and efficiency. The paper presents the trends in the development of autonomous ships and reliability modeling carried out to assess the maturity of Guidance, Navigation, Control, Power and Propulsion (GNCPP) subsystems that are critical for safe and reliable operation of MASS. Based on the simulations with field-failure data as inputs, it is identified that a typical vessel GNCPP system can have a mean time to fail period of 1.2 years. The emergency shore support systems shall require a proof test interval of 22 days to comply with IEC61508 HSE Safety Integrity Level 3 of on-demand availability. The results could help in efficient maintenance planning and integrity management of the autonomous ship systems. The efforts required to realize situation-aware autonomous navigation technologies complying with stringent operational regulatory frameworks are also discussed.