Towards Unmanned Cargo-Ships: The Effects of Automating Navigational Tasks on Crewing Levels

Abstract

This paper presents a method to analyse the required crew composition on board of a short sea cargo vessel. By using a purpose-built tool it is possible to assign all tasks on board to the most appropriate crew member. This tool is used to analyse the changes to crew composition when the navigational tasks on board of the ship are removed from the workload of the crew. The analysis shows that during the normal sailing and arrival and departure phase, this results in a decrease of the required crew size of respectively 3 and 1 crew members. This reduction can, however, only be realised if the procedures during the loading and unloading phase are changed too, since this is the normative phase of the voyage for the crew size.