Seawater Central Cooling System Distributed Approach for a Safer Autonomous Ship

AbstractThe future implementation of an autonomous ship is intended to be an alternative for a sustainable shipping industry. The systems embarked on board of such type of ship should be designed with an enhanced automation, permitting its safe and autonomous operation. The seawater cooling system is one of these important systems, that ensures the cooling down of the low temperature fresh water, that in its turn cools down various thermal machinery on board of a conventional ship. The reliability and availability of this system is a key factor for a safe operation of an autonomous ship. However, its design should permit its autonomous function without human intervention and in case of a failure that cannot be resolved autonomously, the shore control center may take control remotely to restore the normal situation. In this work we propose a multi-agent approach to model the behavior of the seawater central cooling system. Each component of this system is able to act and react autonomously to achieve a function or execute an action. The proposed level of automation may function either autonomously without human intervention or be controlled remotely in case of “Fail to safe” by an operator, based in a shore control center. KeywordsAutonomous shipDistributed systemModelingMulti-agent systemSeawater cooling systemShipping industry