Smart Ship vs Digital Twin of the Vessel
Very often, many people confuse terms such as Smart Ship and Digital Twin. When introducing modern technologies into their business processes, each shipping company should understand what the difference is and could decide which solution to use.
Today, very often among the marine and shipping companies, one can find such terms as Smart Ship and Digital Twin. At first glance, these may seem like synonyms that mean the same technological concepts. But in reality, this is not entirely true. These two terms are different from each other and in this article, we would like to tell you a little about each term separately, in order to remove the misunderstanding once and for all and so that each shipping company, introducing modern technologies into its business processes, could decide which solution to use.
The digital twin of the Ship
A digital twin is a dynamic digital representation of an object or a system describing its characteristics and properties as a set of equations. Complex processes involving a multitude of actors are often difficult decision-making environments that are best modeled digitally prior to action.
A digital twin includes both the hardware to acquire and process data and the software to represent and manipulate these data, making them more powerful than models and simulations because they leverage digital data streams to bridge the barrier between the physical entity and its representation.
This means that digital twin analytics relies on historical data (e.g. a data lake), and real-time digital data streams (e.g. IoT generated data), to analyze possible outcomes.
The term Digital Twin can be used for more than just a vessel. Most often, digital twins are created for the purpose of modeling objects directly related to industrial production. A digital twin also can be used for monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics to optimize asset performance and utilization. In this field, sensory data can be combined with historical data, human expertise, and fleet and simulation learning to improve the outcome of prognostics. Therefore, complex prognostics and intelligent maintenance system platforms can use digital twins in finding the root cause of issues and improve productivity.
Digital twins of autonomous vehicles and their sensor suite embedded in a traffic and environment simulation have also been proposed as a means to overcome the significant development, testing, and validation challenges for the automotive application, in particular when the related algorithms are based on artificial intelligence approaches that require extensive training data and validation data sets.
Smart Ship
The term Smart Ship or Smart Vessel is applied to ships on which a large number of sensors are installed to collect all possible information about the state of the vessel, various indicators, etc. In contrast to Digital Twin, all information collected from the vessel is aggregated in one place, in the office on the shore or, for example, on the captain’s bridge, and the decision is made based on the current readings, without additional stimulation of the situation.
But for this concept to work, an IoT (Internet of Things) platform in maritime is needed that streamlines this process.
The data is stored in a centralized cloud-database providing dashboards for the shipowner and/or managers to use and analyze the data, before making a decision.
To summarize, IoT adoption in the maritime industry is growing with the emergence of many new innovative enterprises. We also notice that a Smart Ship needs a dedicated bandwidth. Communication should no longer be a hidden fee for the shipowner/manager and should be included in the service of the app provider. Read more about marine communications.
