Non Tampered ODMCS Log Using loT/Blockchain

Abstract

Abstract Oceans are the world's largest ecosystem and home to millions of species. Marine pollution is one of the key challenges for sustainability and needs to be addressed. There are various conventions and regulations to control pollution and protect the livelihood of not only the species but also over 3 billion people who depend on marine and coastal biodiversity. Oil tankers may sail without any cargo after discharging the oil cargo in a port. In such situations the tankers have to take ballast water from the sea into cargo tanks to ger better draught and stability. The ballast water carried in the cargo tanks needs to be discharged out at sea before the next cargo loading. Oil Discharge Monitoring and Control Systems (ODMCS) is used to prevent the pollution of ocean by oil or oily mixtures from ships. This paper addresses the use of IoT, Blockchain and related technologies for the implementation of compliance requirements mandated by regulation 34 of MARPOL Annex I which forbids the discharging of oil or oily mixtures from oil tankers but allows it with certain conditions. Today various types of ODMCS are installed on ships to allow discharge overboard when the conditions favor the discharge. However, the discharged related data is collected and stored in the memory card of a computing unit for a minimum of three years for inspections. The issue is this type of storage is more vulnerable for modifications. Also, there is no single place where discharged logs from all ships are collected for global marine pollution analysis. The solution is to place IoT sensors on the critical elements of ODMCS. The sensors send the data points to an IoT router. The router constructs the ODMCS log and publishes that to an onboard blockchain node so that the data cannot be tampered with. As per MARPOL Annex I, all the oil tankers of 150 GT and above must have an approved ODMCS or ODME (Oil Discharge Monitoring Equipment). Hence, the idea here is not to replace the existing ODMEs but to augment them in the process of collecting data and analyzing them for a ship, a geographic region or globally.