Last Friday, our second community meeting took place in Hamburg, Finkenwerder. We have invited all active ship spotters and AIS partners in the area to a maritime restaurant with the best view of the vessel traffic on the Elbe. Anyone who knows the mentality of ship photographers can certainly imagine that the camera doesn’t have to be missing at such an event. Some of our guests snapped ships as well that evening.

In December 2019, the FleetMon Community Meeting took place for the first time, and many users took part. Unfortunately, the event had to be canceled last year due to the pandemic. For FleetMon, such a meeting offers the ideal setting to exchange ideas in a relaxed atmosphere in personal contact with our users and the community of our platform. We want to improve the user experience and further develop FleetMon.com to meet the users’ needs.

In 2021, numerous guests from Hamburg and northern Germany joined the event to talk to Juliane and Sebastian from the AIS team, Steffi handling the Support at FleetMon, and other colleagues to exchange and share experiences. The FleetMon team received valuable insights into how the ship spotters use our platform. In a personal exchange with the community, new ideas arose about how to improve FleetMon.com. Bit by bit, we will tackle a redesign of the community area with a range of new features which are more in line with user requirements.

To everyone who participated in the event: It was very nice to meet you in person! The whole team had a lot of fun with you guys that day. Thank you for your time and input.

We hope to meet you soon for the next FleetMon Community Event.

Just reach out to us at any time to come back with ideas, suggestions, and further feedback.

Have fun with our little photo gallery.

In June 2021, we announced FleetMon’s Innovation Lab, bundling all our Research & Development projects. There’s something new coming out of the Lab:

Around a year ago, we started a pilot project in collaboration with Julius Marine, a local producer of buoys and fairway lighting. The project aims to develop a modular, autonomous AIS station that runs in locations without a power supply or a stable internet connection. In addition to an AIS receiving antenna, the station also contains a variety of measuring sensors. It works autonomously, enabled by two solar panels that supply the powerful battery and the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) module for data transmission with energy. This means that the weatherproof station can operate outside all year round to receive ship position data and other measurement data. Servicing the autonomous AIS station is not necessary.

Guest article by Julia Sokolova, a researcher at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in Saint Petersburg:

Nowadays, shipping companies working in the Russian Arctic, as well as the Russian Government, are actively discussing the possibility of expanding the navigation window in the Northern Sea Route (NSR). Several reasons contributed to this discussion.

Firstly, many studies show a stable tendency of ice cover decrease in the Arctic Ocean, intensified during the last decade. Secondly, modern shipbuilding allows designing vessels of high ice class. Last but not least, remote sensing data helps to reduce time costs for navigation in sea ice.

Since 2017, experimental voyages of LNG carriers through the NSR have been carried out during very early or very late dates. Comprehensive information about vessel movement, power engine work, along with reports on the ice conditions, allows assessing the efficiency of the chosen route and gives a more detailed picture of the ice situation along the entire NSR.

FleetMon kindly provided AIS data to the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI). The data helped our researchers to study the motion of LNG carriers Christophe de Margerie, Nikolay Yevgenov and Nikolay Zubov performing their late voyages during the polar winter in 2021.

If the global shipping industry were a country, it would be the world’s sixth-highest CO₂ emitter, ahead of Germany. As an international industry, shipping was not covered by the 2015 Paris climate change agreement that focused on individual nations’ responsibility for critical emissions. But as unprecedented heatwaves, forest fires and flooding raise global awareness of climate change, the shipping industry is starting to make up for lost time.

How significant is their response? And was Maersk’s recent announcement of investing over US$1.4bn in eight post-Panamax containerships that can run on methanol or bunker fuel just a drop in the proverbial ocean? Let’s take a closer look at how shipping is responding to the climate crisis.

Welcome to the fifth edition of the FleetMon Maritime Gallery. Each month, you’ll find a special section on our blog featuring the Best Maritime Photos in a certain category. You’ll not only get to view the most popular photos being voted by our community for “Photo of the Week” and “Photo of the Month”. We also present special shots which are less noted but in the same way extraordinary.

In September, we want to showcase popular shots of one of the most important vessel types in terms of maintaining maritime security. We’re proud to have a collection of around 3,700 rescue vessel photos on FleetMon.com. Let’s take a closer look at selected photographs and tell their story.

To all our ship spotters out there: We truly appreciate your work. Keep it up, guys!

In March 2020, the Technical University Berlin and five representatives of the port industry started the funded research project SELECT. The acronym “SELECT” stands for “Smarte Entscheidungsassistenz für Logistikketten der Binnenschifffahrt durch ETA-Prognosen” (engl.: “Smart decision-making assistance for logistics chains in inland shipping through ETA forecasts”). FleetMon has been chosen as the official AIS data provider.

The aim of the project is to develop an IT system for port operators and shipping companies that automatically and dynamically predicts the transport processes of inland vessels and thus their arrival times (ETA) at inland and seaports. The digital decision assistant is intended to enable the parties to take suitable actions in relation to the expected arrival time. It considers the entire logistical process flow. Reducing the vessel transit/travel times as well as increasing the handling capacities in inland ports are other important goals.

The research partners are supported by the BMVI (Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure) and receive funds amounting to around one million euros.

Additionally, FleetMon’s data have been used for the teaching course “Supply Chain Analytics” at the Technical University Berlin related to the SELECT project. Visit our Research & Development section to know more about the student case studies in the field of inland vessel ETA predictions.

In 2021, we started to put the spotlight on our passionate ship spotters. Each month, we showcase a different photographer of FleetMon.com. In September, you’ll meet a female user, teacher and children’s author from Germany (User name: antjewhv).

Each month, we announce an update on how we extended our terrestrial AIS coverage worldwide. Become an AIS Partner and contribute to Global Maritime Transparency. Take a look at our latest achievements regarding FleetMon’s AIS station network.

What does port resilience entail?

Port resilience is described as the capacity of ports to anticipate and respond to changing situations, as well as to survive and/or quickly recover from disruptions, with the goal of preserving the sustainability of operations and flow of cargo to, from, and through ports.

Due to the multitude of interdependencies inherent in supply chains, the breakdown of any node in the network can have an immediate impact on demographics, their safety, and well-being, as well as on the regional economy and its enterprises.

The 30th edition of the Hanse Sail was the perfect occasion for us to invite friends & family over to our place. Hanse Sail is Rostock’s annual meeting for museum ships and traditional sailing ships and one of the world’s largest events of its kind. In early August, we opened our doors to celebrate the JAKOTA Open House Day with friends, local partners & family members of the JAKOTA Group. We warmly welcomed all guests to our headquarter to enjoy a couple of cocktails and snacks, relax and watch the sailing ships of the Hanse Sail go by in front of the office. The kids had fun at the raffle (the collected money will be donated to the German Maritime Search and Rescue Association (DGzRS)) and everybody was having a good time. Feel free to scroll through our Photo Gallery.