Safe marine operations during the digital transformation

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The digital transformation is having profound effects on Canada and indeed the world. The pace of change is increasing and Canada needs to prepare if we are to embrace the opportunities afforded by this fourth industrial revolution. Visions of the future include a digital St Lawrence seaway navigated by autonomous ships, and offshore energy installations operated remotely from onshore control centres. En route to the imagined future, the introduction of each new technology brings with it the potential to disrupt operations at the "sharp end" of the working environment where personnel execute their jobs. The project - Safe Marine Operations During the Digital Transformation - is concerned with the safety of complex marine operations as the requisite operating skills and performance expectations of personnel change over time due to continual disruptions arising from the digital transformation. Our goal is to ensure that transformative changes in workplace operations are made safely by developing a human-centred approach to assessing, predicting, and improving human reliability and performance. Our focus is on safety-critical marine operations that are dangerous or relatively infrequent and therefore difficult to prepare for through conventional on-the-job experience. We prototype two examples of technology that can be introduced on the bridge of ships: one to help the operator execute safety critical ice management operations, the other to aid safe navigation through pack ice. We use ship bridge simulators as the venue for experiments to assess the efficacy of the technology in terms of its impact on human performance and operations safety. Such experimental methods will help ensure that the technologies of the digital transformation will be demonstrably safer by design. We also investigate the utility of the simulators as means to improve human reliability and expertise in advance of shipboard operations. Such training technology will help ensure that personnel will be equipped with the expertise to operate safely at the sharp end of the digital transformation.