361 Big Data in Shipping - Challenges and Opportunities Ørnulf Jan Rødseth, MARINTEK, Trondheim/Norway, OrnulfJan.Rodseth@marintek.sintef.no Lokukaluge Prasad Perera, MARINTEK, Trondheim/Norway, Prasad.Perera@marintek.sintef.no Brage Mo, MARINTEK, Trondheim/Norway, Brage.Mo@marintek.sintef.no Abstract Big Data is getting popular in shipping where large amounts of information is collected to better understand and improve logistics, emissions, energy consumption and maintenance. Constraints to the use of big data include cost and quality of on-board sensors and data acquisition systems, satellite communication, data ownership and technical obstacles to effective collection and use of big data. New protocol standards may simplify the process of collecting and organizing the data, including in the e-navigation domain. This paper gives an overview of some of these issues and possible solutions. 1. Introduction Shipping is currently on its way into its fourth technical revolution, sometimes called Shipping 4.0 or cyber-shipping. The first revolution was the transition from sail to steam around 1800, then from steam to diesel engines around 1910 and the third came with the introduction of automation and computerized systems around 1970. The current revolution is about digital data in all aspects of shipping operations and can be compared to what is called Industry 4.0 in the land industry, Hermann et al. (2015). Shipping 4.0 includes extensive use of new technology like Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Services (IoS). This technology provides more intelligent on-board equipment with embedded computers that provide a plethora of new data and information as well as new shore services to use the data. It is not obvious that this is really “big data”. Big data is often being defined as being high volume, high speed and/or high variety so that “conventional” data processing techniques are insufficient for efficiently using the data in analytics, decision-making or control, De Mauro (2015). In terms of processing power and computer capacity one can hardly say that this is the case in shipping today. While large sets of data from ships may be awkward or impossible to handle in some simple tools, it does not really pose big data challenges to today’s computer systems. However, the volume and the complexity of the information will require new methods and tools to enable the users to understand the information properly and, in that sense, can be said to be a form of a big data problem. While the fourth shipping revolution provides a vast number of new possibilities for more advanced on-line control and off-line analytics, there are also a number of other problems than the sheer size of the data sets. This paper explains some of the issues that have emerged in our work on big data and gives some suggestions as to how they can be solved. 2. Increase in availability of data There are several trends that contribute to the availability of more data about ship and ship systems, i.e. navigation and automation systems. All of these trends are connected to Shipping 4.0, but materialises in quite different ways and with very different impact on how easy it is to use the data. This section will give an overview of some of the main data sources used today. 2.1 Bridge data network, mandatory and special purpose instrumentation The ship bridge equipment is normally interconnected with digital interfaces from the IEC 61162 family of standards, IEC (2007-2015). This makes it relatively easy to get access to measurements from the navigation sensors and equipment. A steady but slow increase in carriage requirements from IMO and flag states increases the available data from the bridge.