Sea Traffic Management – The next step for a safer, more efficient and environmentally friendly maritime sector

Transparency leads to better overall decisions resulting in increased efficiency and, in the maritime industry, improved safety as well. Imagine a world where all the information you need is at your fingertips, updated in real-time. And where most information does not have to be entered manually but is collected from various data sources.

A world where the control of information still lies with the information owner and the maritime distributed way of working still remains. A maritime world where the crew focuses on safe navigation instead of reporting, where port calls become even more efficient and just-in-time, making maritime shipping the main transport option for even more goods. We have seen the development of new services in many different industries, and the maritime sector can be revolutionised in ways that we cannot even imagine.Sea Traffic Management will overcome many of the challenges of communication and information sharing between stakeholders in the maritime transport industry. It will create significant added value for the maritime transport chain, in particular for ship owners and cargo owners.

By providing vessels with the ability to see each other’s planned routes, navigators get a more complete picture of how surrounding vessels will influence their onward voyage. Using this data, other services are able to produce valuable information and offer advice to vessels on their routes, such as recommendations to avoid congestion in areas with high traffic, avoidance of environmentally sensitive areas, and maritime safety information. The information exchange between vessel and port actors will improve planning and performance regarding arrivals, departures and turnaround times.

The concept, which is somewhat inspired by the European programme for Air Traffic Management, is broken down in four key enablers:

• Voyage Management services will provide support to individual ships in both the planning process and during a voyage, including route planning, route exchange, and route optimisation services.
• Flow Management services will support both onshore organisations and ships in optimising overall traffic flow through areas of dense traffic and areas with particular navigational challenges.
• Port Collaborative Decision Making (Port CDM) services will increase the efficiency of port calls for all stakeholders through improved information sharing, situational awareness, optimised processes, and collaborative decision making during port calls.
• SeaSWIM (System Wide Information Management) will facilitate data sharing using a common information environment and structure (e.g. the Maritime Cloud). This ensures interoperability of STM and other services.

There is a living Master Plan for how STM will be implemented up till the year 2030.