Winter navigation involves making several decisions by the hour to ensure safety, efficiency, and ecological compliance of vessels. This research by the Marine Technology group at Aalto University involves building decision-support capabilities for navigation in ice using machine learning (ML) models. A human-centered automation is targeted by making the ML models transparent to the end users. The transparency ensures that the seafarers understand how an autonomous system works – its capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, and, most importantly, the decision-making process. A unified database is at the core of this project, integrating information from different sources such as AIS, GIS, SIGRID and subject matter experts. The impact of this project is expected to be two-folds: 1) access to big data from diverse sources through a unified platform and 2) introducing a human-centered approach to automation in cognitively challenging situations such as winter navigation.

2022

2026