Together for Maritime Safety – Start of the EU Project CASCADe

Thus, almost 80% of the collisions and groundings are due to a failure of the system “ship bridge”. To increase safety on board, both the ship bridge as well as the bridge procedures of the crew need to be combined and designed ideally.

The EU project CASCADE – Model-Based Cooperative and Adaptive Ship-based Context Aware Design aims at bridging the gap between the design of the bridge system and the bridge procedures. The focus of this project is to optimize human-machine interfaces on the bridge.
Studies have shown that too much information e.g. on screens or instruments with different user interfaces have led to numerous operator errors and wrong decisions of the crew members. An error that has been made once on a ship bridge can merely be corrected to some extent or in the worst case not at all.

CASCADe is about the human labor perspective on the bridge. During the project concrete safety relevant scenarios shall be used and hereby the bridge procedures will be investigated. Potential failures due to human errors, inconsistent or redundant screen information can already be discovered and solved during the design phase of a bridge.
The aim of the project is to develop an adaptive bridge system that will recognize, prevent and recover from human errors by increasing cooperation between all crew and machines on the bridge and a new human-centered design methodology supporting analysis of agent interaction at early development stages.

Under the coordination of OFFIS – Institute for Information Technology from Germany a consortium of seven project partners from five EU countries will collaborate, such as the British Maritime Technology Group Ltd., Raytheon Anschuetz GmbH, Mastermind Shipmanagement Ltd., the University of Cardiff, Marimatech AS and Symbio Concepts & Products SPRL as well as four associated partners such as the Maritime Cluster Northern Germany, Nautilus International, NSB Niederelbe Schiffahrtsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and the University of Tasmania.

By the CASCADe project – funded under the 7th Research Framework Programme of the EU – OFFIS is able to further expand its expertise in the field of maritime safety. From 15th to 17th of January 2013 the project kick-off is taking place in Kiel/Germany with all partners and a strong support of the Maritime Cluster Northern Germany to define and discuss further project activities. CASCADe will last for three years.

Contact:

Dr. Andreas Lüdtke
Group manager Human Centered Design
phone: +49 441 9722-530
email: andreas.luedtke@offis.de

Dr. Cilli Sobiech
Project leader
phone: +49 441 9722-536
email: cilli.sobiech@offis.de