Carnival Rolls Out Sea Traffic Management for Full Fleet
Carnival Corporation has agreed to integrate its entire fleet with the EUs Sea Traffic Management (S...
Carnival Corporation has agreed to integrate its entire fleet with the EU's Sea Traffic Management (STM) Validation project. Following a successful trial with Carnival's Costa and Aida-brand ships, the rest of the Carnival Corporation fleet has now been added.
Carnival's Costa Crociere division integrated STM support into its Fleet Operation Center software, Neptune. This functionality allows it to interact with other STM services, ports and shore center operators, and to evaluate voyage optimization suggestions received by shore centers. As part of the setup, Carnival ships share their voyage plan automatically with VTS operators along their routes. After Costa's trial, Carnival is rolling the protocol out with its other brands.
“Carnival’s advanced Fleet Operation Center is a good example of how a proprietary ecosystem can be connected to interact with external services via STM. Costa´s contributions in bringing STM forward are most valuable to the project and to the maritime industry at large”, said STM testbed manager Björn Andreasson.
The STM Validation project goal was to provide STM functionality to 300 ships, but with the entire Carnival fleet, the protocol is now on use on almost 400 ships. The other ships have been equipped with STM by Wärtsilä, Furuno and Adveto as an integrated part of their ECDIS.
STM services are designed to allow mariners, VTS operators, shore-based managers and port authorities to make decisions based on real-time information. These services are intended to enable just-in-time arrivals, reduced administrative burden and decreased human factor risks.
As an example, every STM-enabled ship can choose to share the next seven legs of its electronic voyage plan with other vessels. The route is broadcast by AIS and can be selected to be shown on other ships' STM-enabled ECDIS systems. (The receiving ship's ECDIS shows the routes only temporarily, avoiding cluttering the display.)
The EU-funded program's goal is to achieve a 50 percent reduction in vessel casualties, a 30 percent reduction in waiting time for berthing and about seven percent reduction in fuel consumption.