Autonomous Shipping and the Future Workplace of Marine Engineers

7 pages•Published: January 5, 2024

Abstract

Although ship design has not changed substantially for a very long time the engine room machinery and their operation have evolved dramatically. For example, in the 1970s engine rooms tended to be very spacious but by the 1980s engine rooms needed to be much shorter in length. This triggered engineers to set up engine room design and machinery to be more vertical than horizontal. The same is true for the current development toward autonomous shipping. Dual-fuel engines and electric motors with batteries free up a lot of space in the engine rooms. As the engine room and its technologies are evolving, so are the engineers’ role and their jobs onboard ship. This paper reports on the initial finding of our latest ongoing research project “Investigating the future of maritime workplace and the role of marine engineers in autonomous ships” (ROME). The ROME project studies the workplace of marine engineers in future autonomous shipping and investigates the possible effect on engineers’ roles and the type of skill and competency required to perform the role.

Keyphrases: Autonomous ship, Marine Engineer, mass, mooring, Safe Return to Port, Unattended engine room

In: G. Reza Emad and Aditi Kataria (editors). Proceedings of the International Conference on Maritime Autonomy and Remote Navigation 2023, vol 2, pages 67--73

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/bZFC
	https://doi.org/10.29007/224s