Category "Partnering"

FleetMon is supporting the sailing ship SANTA BARBARA ANNA in an innovative project to enhance the onboard experience of participants in its sailing trips. The 44-meter-long three-masted topsail schooner was originally built in England and, in its colorful history, has been used for fishing around Iceland, tourist trips in Barbados, and social youth work. Today it is based in Rostock, Germany, where it is operated by a group of volunteers with various seafaring backgrounds to practice and promote maritime traditions and traditional seamanship.

FleetMon is currently supporting the research project of Dr. Alexandra Muscalus from the Georgia Institute of Technology (“Georgia Tech”) in Atlanta, Georgia. She uses AIS data from FleetMon to investigate the impact of low-frequency ship wake on shorelines in the far-field.

Over the past two days, FleetMon hosted the second bi-national meeting of our MAREMIS research project here in Rostock. Together with our project partners from IHPC in Singapore, we are developing machine learning-based models and a demonstrator to measure, track, and validate emissions-related aspects of maritime transport to reduce emissions from ships. See what we have achieved so far.

Since FleetMon was founded in 2007, we have supported research and development projects worldwide. We offer students, researchers, and academics access to our comprehensive API suite and our extensive AIS data archive. One of our recent projects is with two research fellows from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland). They examine how natural and man-made environmental changes influence marine mammals and seabirds’ behavior and population dynamics.

Transparency and greener shipping are two of our most important goals at FleetMon. Therefore we support students, universities and institutions in their maritime research projects with AIS data. More than 120 universities are part of our cooperation partners – one is Oxford University. In 2022, Daniel Bundred, a MEng student from the Department of Engineering, contacted us and requested AIS data for his project on decarbonizing global shipping.

Some cooperations and partnerships are particularly special to us at FleetMon. These include, above all, those with a connection to our home port of Rostock, Germany. The newest cooperation we have started is with the Maritime Museum. We installed an AIS antenna there and expanded our network; at the same time, we enriched the Maritime Museum with a new attraction.

FleetMon has a network of over 5,000 AIS receivers to guarantee the best coverage for our customers and partners. Our stations are installed at ports, ships, private buildings, and institutions. The group of AIS partners actively setting up stations worldwide has been built up over the last 15 years at FleetMon.

A new major project from FleetMon’s AIS team is a collaboration with Emily Hague, Ph.D. Researcher from the Marine Spatial Analysis Group at Heriot-Watt University in Scotland. She studies the impact of underwater noise of shipping traffic on marine mammals in UK waters.

FleetMon supports Emily in her project with AIS data, covering the urbanized waterway Firth of Forth over a 5 year period. In return, she helped us to set up more AIS stations around the coast of Scotland.

Although the maritime industry has evolved to make sea transport efficient, fast, and reliable, the occurrence of collisions at sea is still high. Considering the ships registered in the EU alone, between 2014 and 2021, there were 22,532 collision occurrences. Globally over 876 ships were lost between 2011-2020, with 49 ships being lost in 2020 alone [1][2]. 

What are the significant factors contributing to such accidents? 

Visit our Research & Development section to read the original paper published by Ömer Harun Özkernak and Gönül Tuğrul İçemer of the Azdeniz University in Antalya, Turkey.

Abstract:

Bilge water waste poses an environmental risk for humans and marine creatures by causing cancer and developmental disorders due to the toxic substances. This study aims to create a calculation method to calculate the amount of bilge that a ship can produce. The number of ships and the amount of bilge water that they have given the port waste reception facilities in the past years were collected to prevent marine pollution caused by ships in the Gulf of Antalya.

The amount of possible future bilge water discharge in the gulf was estimated by using the collected data by linear regression method. The risk distribution of the amount of bilge water that a ship can produce was determined with the data obtained by the Monte Carlo method for the first time in this study. As a result, although the number of ships in the gulf will decrease in number, it is predicted that the amount of bilge water discharge and the needs of a waste receptions facility will increase in the coming years.

In winter 2020, JAKOTA Cruise Systems | FleetMon called out a Charity Week. Within this week, our employees could submit local societies and social initiatives for FleetMon to support and donate money to. A total amount of 5,000€ in donations was available to be distributed among the submitted suggestions. For us, it was essential to support either a maritime association or make a difference in our immediate local area. One of the initiatives we decided to give money to is the “Deutschlandstipendium” (“Germany scholarship”). We agreed to finance two “Germany scholarships”. Since 2011, the “Deutschlandstipendium” has been promoting students and newcomers who are expected to perform well in their studies and at work. They receive 300 euros per month – half from the federal government and half from private donors. This alliance of civil society engagement and state funding is what makes the “Germany Scholarship” so unique.