By
Rebecca Gibson |
Carnival Corporation has connected all ships sailing for its nine cruise brands with the European Union’s Sea Traffic Management (STM) service to enable it to share voyage data with other shipping companies and ports to optimise operations and mitigate collision risks.
The move follows a trial period where Carnival Corporation subsidiary Costa Group integrated STM-supported standardised formats and interfaces with the Neptun software used in its Fleet Operation Center to share data about Costa Cruises and AIDA Cruises ships.
This allowed Costa Group to interact with other STM services, ports and shore centre operators, enabling it to evaluate voyage optimisation suggestions. The ships’ voyage plans were also automatically shared with vessel traffic services along the route.
“With our Fleet Operation Centres we have further increased safety onboard our ships and with STM we can use solution to share voyage plans with all other STM-enabled services, such as route optimisation and Vessel Traffic Services, to create a shared situational awareness,” said Franco Caraffi, IT director for Carnival Maritime.
Initially, the European Union aimed to provide STM functionality to 300 ships, but the figure has reached almost 400 ships now that the entire Carnival fleet has joined the STM Validation project.
“Carnival’s advanced Fleet Operation Center is a good example of how a proprietary ecosystem can be connected to interact with external services via STM,” said Björn Andreasson, a testbed manager for STM. “Costa´s contributions in bringing STM forward are most valuable to the project and to the maritime industry at large.”