Marine areas cover almost 72% of our planet. Still, almost 95% of this realm remains unexplored, hiding many secrets and scientific phenomena. Despite its unknown and unpredictable nature, the sea has been since the ancient times one of the most valuable and exploited “economic platforms” of mankind, with applications crossing different sectors. Indeed, around 80% of the global trade volume is carried by sea, corresponding to 70% of global trade value .
BigDataOcean positions itself to contribute and improve that economic potential, using big data applications developed within four major use cases in the maritime environment:
• Pilot 1 – Vessels’ Operation Improvement. Naval engineers and shipping companies try to constantly minimise fixed and operational costs, as well as their impact on the maritime domain. As the name suggests, this pilot uses data from every available sensor in the vessel to approach maintenance aspects proactively rather than reactively. It also analyses the impact of the environmental conditions and the operational decisions on the vessel’s fuel consumption.
• Pilot 2 – Mare Protection. This pilot provides a series of scenarios based on the POSEIDON Oil Spill Model, offering essential information for the effective response and management of possible oil spill pollution incidents. Forecasting simulations, enhanced with various cross-sectoral marine data, are taking advantage of the variety and extended ocean data volume available in the BigDataOcean platform.
• Pilot 3 – Maritime Security and Anomaly Detection. Events, activities and threats in the maritime ecosystem can potentially impact global safety, economic activity or the environment. Understanding of such events, activities, and threats, known as Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA), has been ineffective in the past due to the lack of data. With BigDataOcean that is changing and is now possible to identify vessel routes based on their motion patterns, enabling proactive measures to minimise threats at sea.
• Pilot 4 – Wave Power as the Next Clean Energy Source. This pilot is exploiting the relationship between two major domains, i.e. the maritime and the energy production, and can clearly contribute to a great exploration of the marine areas. The services available use use multiple numerical models and data sources to evaluate the wave energy potential in diverse regions, hence contributing to the future evelopment of wave energy solutions.
Even if some of the use cases are of private nature, at the moment, Pilots 2, 3, and 4 are available upon registration for testing in the BigDataOcean Platform (http://platform.bigdataocean.eu). Please visit us and provide your feedback.