Remote Inspections Scheme on Tanker Vessels During Covid-19 Pandemic

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global shipping industry has faced unprecedented challenges, necessitating rapid adaptations in regulatory practices and inspection methodologies to ensure the continuity of trade and maritime safety. Remote port state control (PSC) involves the use of technology to monitor, regulate, and manage the activities and compliance of vessels in a port’s jurisdiction without the need for physical boarding or inspection. This study examines the effectiveness of remote PSC inspections within the Asia-Pacific region and assesses their impact on shipping trade during the pandemic. Utilizing a comprehensive analysis of data from remote inspections conducted under the auspices of the Tokyo Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), this research identifies key factors influencing the efficacy of such inspections and their implications for regulatory compliance and maritime safety. Through a methodological blend of quantitative analysis and qualitative evaluation, the study explores how remote inspections have been critical in maintaining operational integrity and safety standards amidst global disruptions. The findings highlight the role of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in facilitating these adaptations, alongside the challenges and opportunities of remote inspection practices. This research contributes to the ongoing maritime safety and regulation discourse, offering insights into the potential for remote inspections to complement traditional methods in a post-pandemic world.

Remote meat inspection is currently not permitted under the European Union food control legislation. However, the environmental impact of travelling to and from abattoirs and increasing shortages of qualified veterinary staff make remote controls a potential future scenario. This paper reports the results of a qualitative study conducted with a sample of nineteen official veterinarians and food business operators in Sweden. We investigated attitudes, perceived risks, and prerequisites for remote meat controls in semi-structured interviews.Results indicate both positive attitudes towards remote meat inspection, and concerns related to technical challenges, reliability and security of data transfer, and possibilities of manipulation of the remote system. Respondents also noted both negative effects, such as physical hurdles for good control, and positive impacts on animal welfare, such as shortened waiting times for slaughter. Considering the current regulatory framework, only 21% of the respondents have had any prior experience with (pilot) remote meat inspections and the additional 11% carried out remote inspections of Food Chain Information documents. Nevertheless, all participants, including the majority without any prior experience in remote inspections, assumed that remote inspections would be done via video streaming. The optimal setting for a remote meat inspection, according to our respondents, seems to be a combination of cameras at fixed locations with body cameras worn by assisting abattoir personnel. Overall, remote meat inspections are possible to introduce but not without significant legal and technical adaptations as well as definition of the conditions for this type of control flexibility.

User-centric immersive virtual reality development framework for data visualization and decision-making in infrastructure remote inspections

With cyber-physical systems, it is not necessary to be physically present at a location to perform work there. Inspection of offshore wind farms is a task that would be beneficial to do remotely, due to the time and high cost required for accessing the turbines for manned inspections. Such remote inspections must be equally effective at finding errors in the turbines, since errors that aren't found can cause expensive failures. This paper describes a remote inspection robot prototype, and how it was used to compare participants' ability to identify errors using remote and manned inspections in two experiments. The results demonstrated that errors with both known and unknown symptoms were successfully identified using remote inspections, although not as effectively as manned. This is considered promising for remote inspections, and what we have learned in these experiments is used in the planning of a larger experiment, and in the development of an improved prototype.

The Utility of Remote Inspections During the COVID-19 Health Emergency and in the Postpandemic Setting

Reliability of remote post-mortem veterinary meat inspections in pigs using augmented-reality live-stream video software

Visual inspection remains key for assessing the condition of bridges and hence assisting with planning and maintenance activities. There have been many efforts to improve or supplement visual inspection processes using new sensing technologies and data capture methods to usher in an era of ‘smart bridges’ or ‘smart infrastructure’. One method to improve data capture is a ‘remote inspection’ where inspectors use digital photographs of a bridge to identify and grade structural defects to the standard of a ‘general inspection’. In this paper, survey data are presented to help formulate a preliminary assessment of the potential for engineers to implement this possible evolution of the visual inspection process. A potential schema for remote visual inspections is developed and presented as a conceptual web application. The focus on the development of the schema includes the need for ease of use by inspectors and integration of collected digital data into bridge management systems. The suggested platform is seen as a transitional method to aid in the long-term implementation of further automation of the inspection process. The system architecture is provided along with possible technologies that may support or enhance it, as well as a discussion of the potential barriers to implementation.

Emerging remote inspection technologies are addressing the challenges of conventional building work inspections by reducing time, cost, and safety risks for inspectors, while also improving overall effectiveness. These technologies involve data collection, information extraction, and compliance checks, highlighting the need for a comprehensive understanding to enable the adoption of more efficient and secure inspection methods. This paper comprehensively reviews cutting-edge technologies, sensors, platforms, and data processing methods applicable to remote inspections across diverse building elements. It evaluates each technology’s suitability for specific building components based on key criteria, including inspected item properties and potential for assistant-based or remote inspection, with emphasis on video-based methods. Furthermore, the analysis considers technology capabilities for automation, real-time functionality, and policy implications for implementation.

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of remote inspections using a robot in a laboratory experiment. The experiment differs from most human-robot interaction experiments in its direct comparison of manned and robotic operations. 21 participants each performed three manned inspections and three inspections with each of the two remote inspection methods, teleoperated and assisted. The effectiveness was measured based on the number of errors they were able to identify. Teleoperated inspections were found to be less effective than manned, although this difference was not statistical significant. Assisted inspections, implemented as an interactive simulation prototype representing a robot with higher autonomy, had similar effectiveness as manned. Because of the time and high cost required for manned inspections of offshore wind turbines, remote inspection can give a large economic benefit. However, this will only be a viable alternative if the robot system is inexpensive and remote inspections are as effective for identifying errors as manned inspections, which the experiment presented here suggests.

This paper presents two advanced drone-based solutions developed for asset integrity and industrial inspection applications: a Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) drone and a 3D First-Person View (FPV) camera system. The NDT drone integrates a lightweight robotic arm with ultrasonic probe as end effector for thickness measurements of metal surfaces. The 3D FPV system provides stereoscopic vision with an automatically vergence-compensated zoom for enhanced depth perception during remote inspections. In the field of aerial inspection technologies those solutions represent significant advancements, offering improved capabilities and accuracy. This document aims to detail the design, implementation, and testing of both the solutions.

Port state control (PSC) inspection contributes a lot to improving maritime safety and protecting the marine environment. After selecting the ships coming to a port for inspection, one critical challenge faced by the PSC authorities is deciding what deficiency items should be inspected and what the inspection sequence of these items is. To address this problem, two innovative and high-efficient PSC inspection schemes describing specific PSC inspection items and sequence are proposed for the inspectors’ reference when time and resources are limited, especially when there are difficulties in estimating the possible deficiencies in advance. Both schemes take the occurrence probability, inspection cost, and ignoring loss of each deficiency item into account. More specifically, the first inspection scheme is based on the occurrence probabilities of the deficiency items in the whole data set, while the second scheme further considers the correlations among the deficiency items extracted by association rules. The results of numerical experiments show that the efficiency of the two proposed inspection schemes is 1.5 times higher than that of the currently used inspection scheme. In addition, the second inspection scheme performs better than the first inspection scheme, especially with inspecting ships with no less than five deficiency items and limited inspection resources.

The Class Society DNV has performed production surveys in enclosed spaces using drones since 2016, demonstrating cost savings and increased personnel safety. The goal is to develop autonomous inspection drones to reduce the need to enter tanks and enable remote inspection. The vision is a drone that can fly by itself, track where it is, and spot rust and cracks, and measure steel thickness. We expect that drone-assisted remote inspection will reduce survey costs for the clients and be a major safety improvement for surveyors. Several drone capabilities are required to enable visual close-up inspection and non-destructive testing in enclosed, GPS-denied, and poorly lit environments. In this study, we report the most recent status from an ongoing research project, including several industry partners. We highlight technical challenges and preliminary results on drone navigation functionalities, computer vision for detection of cracks, and the use of hyperspectral imaging to detect and classify the chemical composition of coatings, rust, and other use cases.

The Capabilities and Effectiveness of Remote Inspection of Wind Turbines

The paper evaluates effectiveness of fire drills for emergency and responding to Port State Control (PSC) inspections on board. A brief background about the PSC inspection on fire drills on board is introduced in the beginning. Then the significance of effectiveness evaluation on fire drills is presented. Next, legal ground is discussed on International Conventions, including regulation of related regional group, national maritime laws and rules and Concentrated Inspection Campaign (CIC). Furthermore, PSC New Inspection Regime (NIR) for Paris Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and Tokyo MOU are also discussed, and many deficiencies related to fire safety measures found in the PSC inspection are statistically analyzed. More importantly, the paper introduces System Engineering Theory, presents the principle and method of effectiveness evaluation, focuses on the preparation, performance and rehabilitation of fire drill and develops the Criterion of Effectiveness Evaluation. Finally, some suggestions are raised to carry out effectiveness evaluation for emergency and responding to the PSC inspection.

Port state control (PSC) inspections, considered a crucial means of maritime safety supervision, are viewed by the industry as a critical line of defense ensuring the stability of the international supply chain. Due to the high level of globalization and strong regional characteristics of PSC inspections, improving the accuracy of these inspections and efficiently utilizing inspection resources have become urgent issues. The construction of a PSC inspection ontology model from top to bottom, coupled with the integration of multisource data from bottom to top, is proposed in this paper. The RoBERTa-wwm-ext model is adopted as the entity recognition model, while the XGBoost4 model serves as the knowledge fusion model to establish the PSC inspection knowledge graph. Building upon an evolutionary game model of the PSC inspection knowledge graph, this study introduces an evolutionary game method to analyze the internal evolutionary dynamics of ship populations from a microscopic perspective. Through numerical simulations and standardization diffusion evolution simulations for ship support, the evolutionary impact of each parameter on the subgraph is examined. Subsequently, based on the results of the evolutionary game analysis, recommendations for PSC inspection auxiliary decision-making and related strategic suggestions are presented. The experimental results show that the RoBERTa-wwm-ext model and the XGBoost4 model used in the PSC inspection knowledge graph achieve superior performance in both entity recognition and knowledge fusion tasks, with the model accuracies surpassing those of other compared models. In the knowledge graph-based PSC inspection evolutionary game, the reward and punishment conditions (n, f) can reduce the burden of the standardization cost for safeguarding the ship. A ship is more sensitive to changes in the detention rate β than to changes in the inspection rate α. To a certain extent, the detention cost CDC plays a role similar to that of the detention rate β. In small-scale networks, relevant parameters in the ship’s standardization game have a more pronounced effect, with detention cost CDC having a greater impact than standardization cost CS on ship strategy choice and scale-free network evolution. Based on the experimental results, PSC inspection strategies are suggested. These strategies provide port state authorities with auxiliary decision-making tools for PSC inspections, promote the informatization of maritime regulation, and offer new insights for the study of maritime traffic safety management and PSC inspections.