China Classification Society (CCS) has confirmed its efforts to ensure that data-driven digital surveys will be the way of the future.
Xiang Linhao, CCS Science & Technology Innovation and Test Centre, believes the transition “traditional on-site survey” to “real-time remote, digital survey” is occurring gradually.
CCS undertook it’s first remote ship survey in 2019. The survey tasks included documents and data, damage and repair, removal of ship class conditions, validity extension, turbine cycle survey, and change of shipowner or ship name.
In 2020, to avoid the impact of the pandemic on ship survey, this expanded to real-time remote annual survey. CCS used technical solutions such as confined ship space communication, remote survey via 5G enabled aerial drones, underwater drones (UAVs), 5G and Ad-Hoc Networks, and wearable devices. 5G’s high speed, low delay and large volume data transmission is able to meet the needs of remote ship survey: large bandwidth, high immunity and strong transmission stability.
Ultra-HD images of hulls acquired by UAVs have been transmitted to CCS’s remote survey centre in real-time for ship surveyors to understand the entire structural status of the hull. This removes the need for scaffolding, aerial cages and other traditional measures which can be inefficient, hazardous and costly.
Xiang classifies remote surveys into three modes:
1. Remote survey within a limited range based on photos, video documents or instant messaging software: A ship surveyor remotely confirms the compliance of inspected items through photos acquired from the ship, video documents or real-time audio and video communication.
2. Remote survey within a larger range through real-time audio and video communication with professional hardware and software equipment based on such solutions as “network communication, acquisition terminals, survey platforms, and ship-shore collaboration”.
3. Remote survey based on data using online monitoring, data analysis, status evaluation, intelligent diagnosis, risk analysis and other technologies to perform digital survey and verification on the conditions of ship structure, equipment and system operation within the applicable range.
With intelligent technologies, remote surveys are developing from being remote witnessing via audio and video information to remote survey based on data. Here, Xiang states that data sources are important because they include data acquired by sensors, measurement data and test records stored in the management system, and image /or measurement data acquired by unmanned aerial /intelligent wearable /portable measuring equipment, etc.
CCS’s Guidelines for Quality Assessment of Ship Data classify data quality as syntactic quality, semantic quality and pragmatic quality, and defines the data quality model from 15 aspects including “correctness, completeness, consistency, certainty, currency, accessibility, compliance, confidence, efficiency, accuracy, traceability, intelligibility, availability, transportability and restorability” through two perspectives, i.e. inherent data quality and system-dependent data quality.
Data used for digital survey generally comes from related information-based and digital systems deployed on ships, supplied to CCS by the shipping company. Therefore, the data identification, data acquisition methods and plans, data storage, data integration, interface protocols, transmission protocols, exchange formats and communication requirements need to comply with unified standards agreed with CCS. Achieving fully digital surveys of ships needs coordinated development of technologies, conventions, regulations, and formation of the data sharing and co-governance ecology of various industrial parties, says Xiang.
CCS is continuing research, studying aided artificial intelligent decision-making through image recognition technology, mechanical ship equipment condition-based survey based on digital twin technology and digital ship survey technologies.
