ALERT — ISSUE 15 — AUTOMATION

Here is the fifteenth issue of he Human Element Bulletin addressing the important matters related to the automation. The topics that have been dealt with by the authors of this release include trust and dependability of ship automation, increasing the manageability of the automated alarms, perspectives of the chief engineer, automation, electronics officers and STCW Convention, staying cool in the liquid natural gas business, mitigating human errors in the use of automated systems that are installed on board marine vessels, meeting various operator's needs, breakdown of the machinery and fire that can subsequently occur onboard a container ship, and others.

The systems that are installed on board ships are protected with the very rigorous standards for design, and redundancy, as well as with the feedbacks activating the alarms. Both reliability and efficiency of subject shipboard systems can be significantly decreased if they have not been properly set up and if they are not duly maintained including regular monitoring - and all these tasks are to be performed by the seafarer, i.e. the human element of the system. The technological revolution that occurred in the past decades totally changed the way of interaction between people and systems. In the today's shipping industry, such human element became an endangered species, and that is mostly because of the increasing number of automation arrangements... This booklet shall be supplemented with this short video.