Gofore Supports NAPA to Improve Maritime Safety and Emergency Response Service Using AWS

AWS Partner Gofore helped build an online platform to allow NAPA Emergency Computer system to share vital data about ships in the cloud. The new system provides fleet operators and emergency response services with information about a ship’s status from anywhere. Gofore used Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Timestream to help build NAPA’s serverless platform that shares vital information about ships to allow experts and emergency response services to provide better and faster assistance.

NAPA is one of the leading software and data services providers for the maritime industry. Its aim is to support better ship design and operations to enable safe, sustainable shipping. Headquartered in Finland, NAPA employs over 200 people with expertise in naval architecture, fleet operations, and digital services.

Launched in 2015, NAPA Emergency Computer is a ship vulnerability monitoring and prediction tool that can be installed on passenger ships. It uses detailed ship structural model and technical data, combined with readings from sensors placed around a ship, to provide critical information in case of a flooding incident to the captain and crew. This information monitors several operational conditions on ships, such as stability, sea conditions, and the number of watertight doors that are open. This data is combined to provide an analysis of a ship’s vulnerability level in normal operating conditions or predict how it will behave in case of a breach in the ship’s hull and any consequent flooding. The NAPA Emergency Computer continuously displays an overall status for the ship, which the captain uses to support decision making.

Previously, information provided by NAPA Emergency Computer was only available onboard. NAPA wanted to make this data available onshore so the ship could be constantly monitored by fleet or flooding emergency experts. If NAPA Emergency Computer data could be shared in near-real time, the captain would get access to faster onshore support.

Although NAPA had a team of in-house IT experts, NAPA turned to Finland-based digital transformation consultancy and AWS Partner Gofore to help with technical cloud expertise and to deliver the project to its timeframe. The company chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because it had used some AWS managed services in other smaller projects and was drawn by the reliability and security of its infrastructure.

The work started in August 2020, when Gofore and NAPA created a proof of concept (PoC) on one ship to thoroughly test the system and gauge user feedback before building a production model. The project team first needed to build a secure channel for information to flow from the ship to the cloud. For this, they chose Amazon API Gateway, which creates, maintains, and secures APIs at any scale.

Amazon Kinesis—a managed service that cost-effectively processes and analyzes streaming data at any scale—collects data from API Gateway and stores it on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. The team wanted a serverless model for the solution and chose AWS Lambda, which lets you run code without thinking about servers or clusters.

Amazon Timestream, a fast, scalable, and serverless time-series database, is used to store all incoming data. Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for any scale, is used alongside AWS Lambda calls to manage identity keys and ensure incoming data from different ships is properly separated. Finally, the team uses Amazon CloudWatch to collect and visualize near-real time logs, metrics, and event data in automated dashboards.

Courtesy: NAPA

The project was completed in April 2021 and now each ship fitted with the system creates a ‘digital twin’ of the onboard NAPA Emergency Computer that can be accessed in near-real time by onshore stakeholders, including the shipping company and, when necessary, emergency response services.

During an emergency, having a replica of the data generated by NAPA Emergency Computer could save lives. “If there is an emergency, the captain and crew might not have the time or capacity to properly describe exactly what is happening to onshore operators,” says Tommi Vihavainen, development coach for safety solutions at NAPA. “Now the fleet superintendent and safety experts have access to near-live data and are able to provide expert advice to the captain, as well as alert rescue services with the ship’s status and whereabouts.”

At sea, a ship’s communications systems rely on limited satellite broadband, so the solution was designed to only transmit data that was absolutely necessary. The NAPA Emergency Computer produces a total of about 10 MB of data per ship, per day. And depending on the availability of satellite bandwidth, the data can be throttled so the system is only updated every minute, or 5 minutes, or more.

The company expects its NAPA Emergency Computer and ship stability data monitoring system to be fitted on about 300 ships within the next 5 years. Being able to replicate the ship’s NAPA Emergency Computer and stability data onshore and in near-real time means that a shipping company can monitor the status of its entire fleet from a central location. “Emergencies are rare and safety is difficult to measure,” says Vihavainen. “Without this system, especially during an emergency, the crew might not have time to properly and precisely update people onshore of every detail about what is going on.”

Over the long term, data collected from the NAPA Emergency Computer can help fleet operators monitor and analyze ship operations and improve overall safety. For example, if the Fleet Superintendent notices that one or more ships regularly mishandle safety mechanisms, such as the closing of watertight doors, then the crew can be ordered to report for additional training.

NAPA is continuously developing new solutions for the maritime industry and is now committed to making them cloud-based where possible. “Our stakeholders really appreciate having all this information available and are far more reassured than they were before,” says Vihavainen. “Now, when we want something new, we can turn to our trusted partner Gofore to see if it’s realistic, and how to go about it on AWS.”