Andy Norris, conference producer, welcomed the attendees by recalling his experiences with the very first trials of electronic charts systems in the early 1990ies. At the time he believed that five years hence the majority of shipping would be navigating on electronic chart systems. However, as matters turned out, regulatory process, the standardisation process and the production of official electronic charts defeated his optimism somewhat. Nevertheless, he dared to present his firm conviction that in five years from now the majority of shipping will be navigating on electronic charts. He feels on much firmer ground now than then. Today, the regulations are in place. The new Chapter V of SOLAS is coming into force on 1st July 2002, type-approved ECDIS systems are on the market and systems for on-line digital distribution of chart updates to vessels at sea are in place. In addition, official electronic charts for the most critical areas for navigation around the world are becoming increasingly available, most notably in Europe, in North America and the Far East, with South America, the Mediterranean and the ROPME Sea Area as close followers.
Flag State Requirements
Representatives from maritime administrations of UK, Germany, The Netherlands and Norway gave Conference the current status on their national implementation of ECDIS regulations. There is generally full support for ship-owners wishing to change to full electronic navigation using official electronic charts (ENCs). By far the strongest expression of this support is found among the states bordering on the Baltic Sea, who have introduced an explicit acceptance of ECDIS in an international Convention, the Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea, also known as the Helsinki Convention. Visit www.helcom.fi
The greatest differences in national implementations of the IMO ECDIS regulations are seen in the back-up requirements when these differ from a second independent type-approved ECDIS. The requirements for the back-up system vary from a full paper chart folio to a Raster Chart Display System. In short: If you want to use anything but a second ECDIS as back-up, better check with your flag state administration.
Availability of Official Electronic Charts
Representatives from major distributors of charts, publications and updates to these, gave a status on the availability of official electronic charts. Whilst the task of obtaining sufficient charts for a voyage from Europe to the Far East is still somewhat complex, coverage is rapidly getting better and there is hope that the various data protection methods used for official data will converge toward a single international standard.
Prices of official data have come down to a level where the costs are comparable to the cost of paper charts, when the time spent on updating these charts is taken into consideration. One important part of the supply chain for official electronic charts is the transmission of up-dates via telecommunications. Such services are now becoming commercially available at an affordable cost and from the chart agent’s point of view there is definitely light at the end of the tunnel. Most recently the International Hydrographic Organisations have published an overview of available, produced and planned official electronic charts. Visit www.iho.shom for the latest.
User’s Experience
From Herning Shipping in Denmark, the Safety officer, Mr Hildur Friis, gave an account of current experience. The company has been using Electronic Chart Systems for some years as an auxiliary aid to navigation and has recently completed ECDIS installation on the first vessel. This process has been quite troublesome, due mainly to instability in the software, with numerous new versions being installed.
At the time of the conference the system was stable, but this experience presented a new question: is the type-approval still valid after all these new versions? Dr Mathias Jonas, head of the German Maritime Administration’s type-approval laboratory, was in the audience and able to confirm that updates to software were allowed without going through the type-approval process again. However, there was one condition: that the main functionalities, which had been type-approved, remained unchanged. This evaluation was left to the OEM in order to allow some flexibility in software-driven systems.
Though Herning Shipping still is biding time before full fleet introduction of ECDIS, mainly waiting for sufficient chart coverage, the decision to eventually move to full ECDIS implementation remains firm. According to the company, alone planned savings in Mates’ time spent doing updates of paper charts - a process that is both time-consuming and error-prone - provided justification enough here. The numerous benefits of using ECDIS is an added bonus. Herning Shipping is experiencing an increased pressure from its main customers, the oil companies, to document charts being kept up-to-date at all times. "They are even tougher than the United States Coast Guard in their demands," said Hildur Friis.
Input from the Royal Danish Navy (RDN), which is in the process of a navy-wide ECDIS implementation, supported the decision by Herning Shipping to move to full ECDIS implementation. Of particular interest was the RDN prioritisation on which charts to use if ENCs are not available. This order of priority is:
- Official ENCs
- Digital Nautical Charts from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in the USA
- Private vector charts
- Official raster charts
The reasoning behind this is that the functionalities of the vector charts justify time the RDN has to spend making sure that privately produced charts are complete and up-to-date when compared to the official raster charts, even though the former come with an updating service.
Training for ECDIS Use
Training of mariners in the use of ECDIS is a must, was the headline of the presentations on this issue. Not only because it is required by the ISM code but also because navigating with ECDIS is a very different kind of navigation. The IMO have developed the IMO Model Course, a generic training course lasting five days. A number of training institutions have adapted the Model Course to fit their own simulator-based training environment and are ready to offer the essential training to new ECDIS users.
A glance at the graphic representation of the minimum carriage requirements for navigational equipment contained in SOLAS Chapter V regulation 19 in Figure 1 and the similarly graphic representation of an ECDIS-equipped bridge in Figure 2 leaves no doubt that training is necessary to use the ECDIS equipment properly.
One important aspect of such training is to learn to manage the information so that the relevant information is available at the right time. It might be feared that the mariner be so caught up in the system that a proper look-out is neglected. However, this anxiety is put to rest by the RDN. A commanding officer expressed his experience this way: "I have never spent so much time looking out of the windows - before we spent time with the head buried in the ARPA and bent over the chart table - now we have all the information we need at one glance!"
The last speaker of the two days expanded on the long and sometimes painstakingly slow process of ECDIS and Electronic Chart Development in his presentation entitled ‘ECDIS - Milestone or Mill stone?’ His conclusion, and the overall conclusion of the Conference, was ‘Definitely Milestone!’
A number of the presentations given at the conference can be found at www.thedigitalship.com by selecting ‘Free presentations from past conferences’.
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