The marine industry sustains some of the most complex and diverse leisure and transportation vehicles in the world equipped with sophisticated, software-determined devices. As an example, an average 32-meter yacht carries onboard numerous electronic devices with software contents estimated to approx. 5 million lines of executable software code (2008, LOC/FT study by MARSEC-XL). The same yacht is estimated to “contain” around 50 million LOC by 2015. About 90% of world trade is carried by international shipping industry today. There are two main segments within the maritime industry:
commercial (ships) and leisure (yachts and boats). The world fleet of ships registered amounts to 50,054 as of 31st October 2010. The total number of boats and yachts registered globally is estimated to around 30 million, with circa 18 million registered in the US alone.
Currently, the marine industry is highly segmented, comprising of a few key players and thousands of SMEs. Today, most marine electronic systems operate on proprietary networks allowing only integration between devices operating on the same network. The lack of an open standard permitting interoperability between devices and systems from a variety of manufacturers is limiting the progress and innovation in the field. The lack of a well-defined architecture allowing the use of standard components, systems and solutions is negatively impacting the quality of current systems.
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MARSSA sets out to provide an open platform, which will serve as a base for the development of standards and, at the same time, an architecture to support the integration of all software-dependent devices and systems on all types of sea-going vessels. Seamless interoperability will be achieved and a platform stimulating innovation and competitiveness will be provided on a high quality framework based on proven industry standards. A new mainstream will be created in the maritime industry.
MARSSA will serve as the foundation for integration, compatibility and interoperability in the marine industry, thereby transforming it into an opportunity-driven business environment beyond the state-of-the-art with a community-based open innovation promoting enhanced competitiveness. MARSSA will initiate a radical breakthrough in the marine industry by enabling the use of standards, higher user satisfaction through seamless interoperability and higher quality whilst at the same time radically reducing the total cost of ownership.
MARSSA, as the foundation, will provide 80% of the core technology much needed by the maritime industry. This will allow vendors and manufacturers to focus on the remaining 20%, which will provide their value added differentiating portion. MARSSA will spread the maintenance cost of the 80% across the vendors through collaboration and through the use of Linux and other open technologies. The maritime industry will through MARSSA benefit even from the knowledge and investments made by other industries. That leaves resources to innovate where it really matters resulting in innovative and high quality products benefiting the owners and operators of the vessels. MARSSA will open vast new opportunities for companies currently in and outside the marine market. Innovative SMEs as well as multinationals will be able to prosper in the marine market using MARSSA as a platform and vehicle to a large and diverse customer base. The challenge of today: “how to integrate” will be turned into an opportunity of tomorrow: “how to innovate”.
Cross-Industry Influences
In the aerospace, automotive, healthcare and other industries outside the marine domain today there are developments in the area of software and systems architecture such as SAVI (System Architecture Virtual Integration), AUTOSAR (Automotive Open System Architecture), emerging technologies in AAL (Ambient Assisted Living), COTS integration architectures, crowd-sourcing platforms and proven open-source environments. Until 2005 automobile manufacturers, suppliers and tool developers were struggling with lack of interoperability, hampered innovation and vendor lock-in issues. To mitigate the situation the automotive industry jointly embarked on the development of AUTOSAR, an open and standardized automotive software architecture. Today, the maritime industry is facing similar challenges.
MARSSA is aiming beyond the AUTOSAR scope by basing the approach on already existing, proven standards from the Open Source and COTS domains. MARSSA will drive improvements in the marine industry through opening up to the feedback and contributions of all relevant stakeholders in the maritime industry and outside it, including university
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students, marine software engineers as well as non-marine innovative ICT organizations. MARSSA will use proven methodologies, standards, architectures and operating systems such as commercial embedded and general purpose computing hardware suitable for applications in self-sustained marine vessels, thereby leaving MARSSA as open as possible. MARSSA will provide a platform consisting mainly of COTS processing systems. This approach will enable SMEs as well as technological software houses, both within and beyond the maritime industry, to add value to MARSSA by implementing MARSSA-compliant software components and systems, thus ensuring seamless integration on vessels, and eventually benefit from the new market opportunities.
MARSSA will drive a radical change in the marine software systems design. This will be achieved by implementing concepts from cloud computing reducing dependency on proprietary components and instrument-centric thinking. A possible implementation will use onboard plug computers in a dynamic configuration as the point of computation. The MARSSA approach will allow companies to provide high-quality, MARSSA-compliant software systems, running on a dynamic computational platform, which can be displayed on any available screen, it being for example an iPad, Blackberry, Android device or any HD display. This will lead to improved system availability and reliability as well as seamless interoperability. Cloud computing lends itself very well to the task at hand since it promotes efficient use of resources, inherent redundancy and security. All these features come from the fact that the computing power is pooled between the various services offered by the system and the services may be started and stopped as required and depending on the available resources.
MARSSA creates the platform for tomorrow’s marine vessels by using today’s brains and standards through an open source, open innovation and community-based approach. Looking ahead, MARSSA may also serve as a blueprint for other industries in the future.
The Community Contribution
The platform will be implemented based on a well-defined, but at the same time dynamic approach, where every detail of the architecture will be proposed and refined by all willing and able contributors to enable wide spread use. MARSSA will unify and bring together people from all backgrounds from all over the world: a marine technology guru in Finland, an Olympic gold medallist in Italy, a software guru in California and a research engineer in Malta will collaboratively contribute to this revolution by adding value to the platform, suggesting new ways forward based on particular talents and experiences, highlighting challenges encountered and providing innovative solutions for the future. All small and big players in the marine industry will also be invited to contribute and use the platform, thus adding value to their products and services. By means of MARSSA, some companies will focus on solely creating a library of components, such as a component to calculate the maximum possible speed of the vessel based on GPS data, whilst other manufacturers will focus on integrating these software components with one another and creating a final end product.
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Through the contributions in the area of cloud computing it is now possible to implement a private cloud on board a marine vessel and this will be one of the possible implementations of MARSSA.
The MARSSA architecture implementations will run on top of a server farm composed of distributed computers / nodes, which provide the required computing power as well as data storage. The private cloud running on top of the server farm will be connected to the various on-board devices as well as to the public cloud. The connectivity to the public cloud will not be a requirement for successful operation of the private cloud, which will be able to run in an autonomous environment.
MARSSA is a truly revolutionary initiative and approach that will provide a platform for increased competitiveness and compliance with end customer requirements for the entire maritime industry. MARSSA will empower end customers and open up opportunities in the marine market for innovative and change-willing organizations. Over time, being established as an industry-wide de-facto standard, most marine key players will make their products MARSSA-compliant.
The realization of MARSSA will result in the establishment of an open collaborative platform for the integration of all MARSSA quality assured software systems, by using state of the art software engineering principles and methodologies through an open source, open innovation and global community-based approach.
