Collaborative technologies for maritime transport at economies of scale

Mikael Lind and Almir Zerem from the Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) are joined by Adam Roark and Michele Sancricca from AWS Transportation & Logistics, Amazon, along with Hanane Becha from UN/CEFACT, Erminio Di Paola from HERE Technologies and IATA’s Henk Mulder in penning this collaborative piece for Splash.

Never has the need for digital data sharing and processing at scale been more apparent than now. The growth of digitally connected devices and the ever-growing complexity of digital systems provide increasing opportunities for data analytics, new digital innovations to support enhanced smartness in transport operations, and virtual near to real time learning systems, including digital twinning, to empower better decision-making. To harvest all these opportunities, this new emerging “data-driven” practice requires global approaches to robust, secured and scalable connectivity, data storage, and data processing that is offered by contemporary cloud computing providers. In order for actors within the maritime, as well as within the wider global transport sector, to utilise these capabilities of collaborative technologies, these providers need to offer global interoperability by adopting standardised communication frameworks agreed within the practice. This is important to enable transport operations to reach their desired economies of scale coming out of emerging shared common situational awareness for supply chain efficiency and visibility among actors within the self-organising ecosystem of maritime transport. Standardisation efforts are also important to allow for flexibility in the choice of provider, to allow for connectivity between the local data sharing environment and global connectivity, as well as to enable a seamless change management process from the fruition of traditional, on-premise IT systems to cloud based technologies.