James Gladman, Chief Naval Architect for Expleo, shares three opportunities for leaders to do more with in-service vessel data. Discover the benefits of data analysis across marine engineering, decision making, predictive maintenance and operational efficiency.
The launch of new vessel types or break-through technologies tend to attract the loudest headlines in the marine industry. But what of the many thousands of in-service vessels and existing technologies that are so critical to the strategic success of commercial operators and navies? Forget those at your peril.
Keeping vessels at sea for longer and maintaining their ability to function in the desired operational state is the most pressing priorities to fleet operators’. But outdated approaches to reliability and maintenance can leave you swimming against the tide. With an average lifespan of between 15 to 50 years, the ability to support, repair and refit vessels is a precious resource.
That’s where data makes the difference. Rapid improvements in data harvesting and analysis are allowing vessel owners to hold in-depth ‘conversations’ with their assets, like a doctor diagnosing a patient. The vessel can now clearly communicate its current condition and needs – what’s going well and where it needs help – so that operators are better informed to make proactive decisions.
Here are three ways that data and digitalisation will help you ‘listen’ to the performance of your in-service vessels with a view to improving marine engineering and operational efficiency.
1. Increase the availability of platforms
The marine industry continues to face challenges regarding vessel availability, capability and reliability. Being able to predict equipment failures before they happen using real-time data will help to more effectively plan maintenance activities based on evidence, offering tangible gains in availability.
At a time of rising global instability, a naval vessel stuck undergoing unplanned maintenance becomes even more of a critical issue. To increase platform availability, in-service leaders need a way to understand the real-time performance of onboard systems — and predict maintenance issues.
New predictive maintenance solutions can track the real-time health of platforms — from entire engines to individual components. This data can then be used to identify potential faults earlier, track equipment & component degradation, and create digital models to predict the effects of failure across the full vessel eco-system.
Predictive maintenance is already being used in the aerospace and automotive sectors, and the same technology can help solve the maintenance challenges being faced within marine.
Navigating success
As with marine fleet operators, airlines face a daily challenge to ensure continued availability and reliability of their aircraft. Expleo is developing predictive maintenance solutions for a major European airline manufacturer, based on an expert combination of aeronautical systems engineering and refined data analysis. By providing technical investigations into the failure modes of components, we are reducing the potential for unexpected technical breakdowns that can ground their aircraft – at vast expense.
2. Better harness and analyse in-service data to optimise future designs
Your vessels, and the ‘system of systems,’ generate millions of data points across their life cycles — providing invaluable insights that can transform how your next-generation vessels are designed and operated.
But the truth is, all that in-service data is often underused, or left entirely untouched. There are understandable reasons for this: the volume, complexity, and classified nature of marine data makes it hard to analyse and share with the right people. And yet, it’s a challenge that can be solved.
Better understanding of data can help to collect, consolidate, and catalogue complex and sensitive data. Instead of being fragmented across systems, vital insights are visualised using a single interface, then easily tagged and shared with the right stakeholders.
The volume and classification of marine data often creates a barrier in terms of sharing insights, but the right approach to data management can unlock new opportunities to optimise.
Navigating success
Working with one of the world’s leading automotive manufacturers, Expleo developed a platform to simplify vehicle data analysis during early testing. Along the development phase of a new vehicle, our client’s engineers needed to analyse millions of data points to identify faults, optimise performance, and meet regulatory standards, within strict data privacy laws. But they were doing this manually using multiple solutions.
Our DevOps teams helped build a self-service cloud-based data platform that unified all our client’s vehicle data in one centralised place to simplify data analysis. Now, their engineers can identify and fix issues sooner and reduce costs thanks to improved efficiencies.
3. Capture, analyse, and share operational data to improve decision-making
Your operational decisions hinge on being able to harness and disseminate the right kind of data — swiftly and securely.
That’s a major challenge given the array of data sources that might need to be analysed — from on-board sensors to satellite feeds to social media activity. And in the context of a multi-nation taskforce, data needs to be shared securely with different nations using different command and control systems.
How do you capture, analyse, and segment your operational data to get a coherent picture of what’s happening? It’s a fundamental challenge for in-service leaders in the marine industry.
And it starts with bringing all your data together in one place. By applying big data analytics, vast amounts of structured and unstructured data – collected from multiple sources – can be integrated and visualised centrally, via a single platform.
In an operational environment, this streamlined approach can give marine decision-makers a clear view of everything that matters — from IoT streams and maintenance history to machine analytics and OEM data. A well-defined governance framework can also ensure the right protocols are built in so that relevant data is only accessible by specific users.
Navigating success
Automotive manufacturers receive a large volume of feedback from various sources, including online reviews, surveys, and social media. Analysing this diverse and extensive feedback requires efficient methods and tools to extract meaningful insights.
To help predict vehicle breakdowns and reduce vehicle quality issues, we are helping a global automotive manufacturer to pull vehicle data from multiple sources in different formats — which can then be analysed via a real-time interface. For example, our solution for analysis of customers’ reviews is based on a Generative AI model that identifies the topics and sentiments in reviews. Our client can discern patterns and preferences, enabling them to refine products, enhance services, and optimise the overall customer experience.
Expand the conversation
Data is the lifeblood of your organisation. Every process, person, department, and workflow across your product life cycle are in some way connected. A design decision can impact the security of a platform, perhaps twenty years in the future. A recurring maintenance issue, identified during in-service, has huge potential value if it’s shared and acted upon in earlier phases of the product or design lifecycle.
The key to a seamless flow of information therefore hinges upon digital continuity.
At Expleo, we can help establish digital tools and processes that make it easier to collaborate, streamline handovers, share data, and facilitate back-and-forward feedback between all your teams. We can bring digital continuity to your entire product life cycle including IT and digital, manufacturing and engineering.
