Accidents and inefficiency continue to be major challenges for waterborne operations. EfficienSea 2 will work with two categories of solutions. The first category is the rethinking of decades-old services such as Maritime Safety Information and Notices to Mariners, Meteorological (METOC) information and ice charts. Today, these services are, for the most part, delivered in an ineffective manner using old technology or with modern but proprietary, non-standardised solutions. This gives the user on a ship’s bridge a lot of work detecting which information is relevant, thus wasting time and possibly overlooking vital information. The project will develop, standardise and demonstrate new solutions that filter out irrelevant information and portray important information in a user-friendly manner, bringing these solutions very close to full implementation in commercial equipment.
Space weather, smart buoy sensors, route handling and exchange, crowd sourced ice data, no-go comfort zone.

The second category has to do with ground-breaking services that are new to the market. For these e-navigation services, new technology will be developed and applied to combine multiple information sources and, facilitated by the internet of things and crowd sourcing of data, to create entirely new services that are envisioned to increase situational awareness, for instance decision support for ice navigation, and also to apply Human factors expertice to users interaction with multiple different sources of information services. The service solutions with the greatest potential for having an impact on safety and efficiency will be developed, demonstrated, evaluated and where applicable standardized, and where possible provided as first generation service for immediate impact.

The communication framework Maritime Cloud created in EfficienSea 2 will play a huge role for the future of maritime traffic management. It will - when fully implemented - link all relevant current and future maritime ICT systems for interoperability. A number of the services developed will increase do-main and situation awareness for the navigator, and thus ease pressure on congested areas. Finally the project will create services for route exchange enabling improved traffic management.

EfficienSea 2’s overall objective is to create and deploy innovative solutions for safer and more efficient waterborne operations through the combined competences of leading authorities, academia, European companies and international organisations. With a total of seven specific objectives all playing together on one framework, the project targets the following sub-challenges.

• Create and implement a ground-breaking communication framework –the ‘Maritime Cloud’ that will enhance information sharing in and around the maritime sector for smarter traffic management and facilitate a comprehensive e-maritime and e-navigation environment, enabling the maritime internet of things.
• Identify, develop, test, and where possible standardise and implement e-navigation solutions that will reduce the risk of accidents, especially in dense traffic lanes, as well as increase efficiency of the transport chain.
• Develop, test and where possible implement e-maritime solutions for automated reporting and efficient port information and thus minimise delays and turnaround times as well as administrative burdens.
• Create and implement navigational support services and a new self-organizing emergency response solution in remote and difficult environments such as the Arctic in order to reduce the risk of loss of life.
• Develop solutions to monitor emissions with a focus on SOx and conduct validation trials in the Baltic Sea Region.
• Create innovative and cost-effective solutions with novel communication technology to deal with ships’ challenge of getting access to information services at a reasonable price, especially in remote places such as the Arctic.
• Set the technical and governance standard for the above areas, particularly in regards to e-navigation solutions.