The connected fleet of the future. A multilevel platform solution to improve safety and operational performance in the maritime industry

In the maritime industry, and particularly the cruise industry, the control issues concerning the security have not acquired an established experience yet. In the automotive industry, on the contrary, the Remote Fleet Management (RFM) is a popular technology that monitors a group of vehicles wirelessly. RFM is used for many purposes: GPS tracking (also referred to as Automatic Vehicle Location - AVL), scheduling maintenance, remotely diagnosing vehicle problems and reporting the condition of vehicles. Such a technology is employed to provide increased officer safety, an efficient work environment, and substantial financial savings for instance for law enforcement fleets. Safety is increased with the ability to determine the location of the vehicle while it is on the move. Efficiency is improved since potential damage can be detected and fixed before an actual breakdown of a vehicle. Costs would be reduced since the labour required to collect and update vehicle status for police cruisers would be reduced (Kim et al., 2005). Moreover, in the aviation industry, for historical reasons the control issues concerning the security have always been considered and addressed in a standard manner worldwide. The lack of standardization has resulted in a lack of integration and availability of data shoreside. Nonetheless, in the last decade, all on-board systems have been equipped with interfaces able to expose their telemetry data so that they are potentially networkable. In recent years, several Vendors have created solutions for the data acquisition and monitoring of their own systems. Unfortunately, these applications, usually available only on board, cannot be easily integrated with those of other vendors. Therefore, it is necessary to choose a Vendor and set up expensive and long-term plans to standardize the on-board systems using the hardware of this Vendor. After this is done, the comparative analysis of data coming from different ships or cross-analysis of data coming from different systems still remains difficult.