Supporting Maritime Remote Experts Working Over Distance

Abstract

Within the maritime domain there is a shift taking place towards how troubleshooting (i.e. understanding and fixing equipment issues) is being offered to maritime customers. Instead of travelling to ships around the world, service support engineers now remotely connect and access data from equipment sensors on-board. With this game-changing approach to fixing equipment issues comes the need to effectively support this change in work-practice since engineers now need to solve complex problems from an onshore location. Based on findings from field studies, we present a prototype as a first-step towards addressing some of the key needs of these engineers which include improving situation awareness for enhanced remote troubleshooting, integrating all relevant information for easier searching, and faster access to relevant personnel for help. The prototype was validated with domain specialists, and based on the findings a set of design recommendations is also presented.