Abstract
Accelerating technological advancement in the maritime industry is gradually increasing the range of functions once performed by humans to become automated. In the era of autonomous shipping, where the autonomous operating system takes the lead and data flows define decision-making, how the ship and its leaders can successfully navigate these new ways of working have important implications for safety, efficiency and reliability of future ship operations. It is critical that the non-technical skills requirements, in particular the leadership competencies, be re-evaluated as new operational paradigms of shipping systems emerge and evolve. This study extends the current research of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) by using a Delphi consensus survey and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with a panel of 36 experts to (1) bridge a knowledge gap, i.e., the lack of an understanding regarding the leadership implication of autonomous shipping; (2) evaluate the applicability of current STCW leadership requirements for MASS operations; (3) identify and prioritize the leadership competences that should be accrued by the personnel involved in future ship operations. The results have shown that the current STCW framework is not fully relevant for MASS. The redefined leadership competence and the constructed hierarchy of criticality generated from this study can be valuable input for revision of the STCW and maritime education and training practices, contributing to successful ship operations of the future.
Highlights
By following up on the research trend on Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS), this paper aims to address this gap by investigating the leadership implication of autonomous shipping, evaluating the STCW leadership requirements to cope with increased autonomy and exploring the future leadership competences that should be accrued by the personnel involved in the ship operations
By building on the results derived from Delphi, a mathematically grounded technique for multiple-criteria decision making— Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) (Saaty 2003)—was applied to rank the leadership competence requirements based on their relative importance under different MASS operational situations and to identify the critical leadership competence that plays the principal role
The consensus from the panellists has shown that leadership remains an essential ingredient for future ship operations under both unmanned and manned MASS
Summary
The maritime industry is undergoing a wave of increased automation and digitalization, while interest and development of unmanned, remotely controlled and autonomous vessels are flourishing (Porathe et al 2018; Ringbom 2019; WMU and ITF 2019).Remotely controlled and autonomous shipping solutions have the potential of addressing many concerns the industry currently faces—such as seafarer shortages, welfare of seagoing personnel, safety and reliability of ship operations, improved fuel consumption and operational efficiency—through reducing or reorganizing the workload of human operators, manning requirements and the risks associated with human failures (i.e., errors or violations) (Komianos 2018; Porathe et al 2018; Pribyl and Vessels 2018). Remotely controlled or autonomous solutions implies that the routines of ship operations and the roles, duties and responsibilities as well as the leadership displayed by the shipboard leaders (e.g., masters, chief officers, chief engineers and second engineers) will be radically different compared with conventional shipboard organization (Kitada et al 2018). The existence of these positions may be in jeopardy (Sharma et al 2019). It is critical that the STCW leadership strategies be re-evaluated in this new context to adequately take advantage of autonomous shipping potentials
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