Class looks to the future
IACS Members continue their unique contribution to safety in the face of a deep transformation of the industry
By Roberto Cazzulo , IACS Council Chair
After more than 40 years with a classification society, I am proud to be elected Chair of the IACS Council for 2024-2025. It is a great challenge, and I will put all my experience at the disposal of the IACS Member classification societies.
Since June 2023, I have had the opportunity of participating in Council and Chair office meetings and have appreciated the impressive job carried out by Nick Brown and his team for the previous two and a half years. They adopted significant changes to internal governance, navigated the remote working of the Covid period, and have improved relationships with stakeholders who have a great deal of trust in and expectations of class, including the IMO, Flag and Port States, and the industry.
Class is a unique concept, covering the whole lifecycle of a ship from design, surveillance during construction, periodic surveys of ships in service, and carrying out a verification of compliance with class rules and statutory regulations.
Through this experience, classification societies can promote the continuous improvement of rules and regulations to meet the objective of protecting life at sea, the environment, and ships and cargo.
IACS can be of great help in keeping the three pillars of people, planet, and property together to ensure a sustainable future.
We cannot forget the amount of work carried out by IACS Working Groups for the maintenance and continuous upgrade of class rules, as well as for the consistent implementation of statutory requirements. This is one of the cornerstones of IACS, requiring close collaboration between Members, who make unique contributions to maritime safety through technical support, compliance verification, and research and development.
Looking forward, IACS is pursuing three main work-streams that will have a great impact on shipping in the next few years from the safety and environmental protection points of view.
Those are:
A year ago, IACS launched a Safe Decarbonisation Panel focused on safety issues associated with each of the principal alternative fuel types, recognising that there will not be a sole viable solution to meet the 2030-2050 targets. IACS is agnostic about the choice of renewable energy or green fuel that might be used for shipping, but recognises that an early significant accident might jeopardise the implementation of a promising novel technology.
IACS has already provided the IMO with its gap analyses, and it is developing class Unified Requirements (URs) and guidelines about the use of methanol, ammonia, and hydrogen as marine fuels, as well as other means to reduce carbon emissions, such as electric batteries, fuel cells, and carbon capture technologies. Those do not exclude the use of nuclear power, either onboard or as a means to produce synthetic fuels, which might be considered in the future too.
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Focus on Digital Transformation
The second workstream is about the digital transformation of the shipping industry, which is already happening although not yet on a large scale, but rather as voluntary measures adopted by experienced operators. IACS has set up a Safe Digital Transformation Panel to embrace a wide range of issues not currently covered by class rules and statutory regulations.
For instance, these include IACS URs on cyber resilience of ships and of onboard systems and equipment; the complex integration of hardware and software systems on board, requiring the application of systemic approaches; communication of data from ship ashore; and autonomous vessels.
Examples of AI techniques that may be applied in these fields are:
This Panel will identify the top priorities to assist industry and the IMO, bearing in mind that these aspects will have a significant impact on the way ships will be designed, constructed, and operated in the future.
The third workstream that IACS is focused on is about the human element, specifically the implementation of innovative technologies on board and ashore. Ships today are increasingly home to a wide variety of novel technologies that are used by the crew to facilitate operations at sea.
This should attract a new generation of skilled engineers to operate complex systems, dealing with a high level of integration and interaction. The qualification of officers and crew should follow such an evolution, and there are possible implications for the current STCW Convention.
Systems should be designed at the start following human-centred principles to prevent an accident that is later attributed to human factors.
Rules and regulations should follow the same principles and should not be based solely on procedures and instructions that imply a lot of paperwork. At the earliest design stages, those who interface with the system directly or remotely must be kept in mind, including what might reasonably be expected from them, the skills and training required during normal operations, as well as planning for foreseeable abnormal or emergency scenarios.
Classification societies can play an important role in this respect. Model-based engineering, simulation, and predictive techniques can support the verification and validation requirements at the design stage as well as throughout the whole lifecycle.
This will have an impact on the scope of class too. For instance, an insight into actual and predicted ship conditions may offer an alternative to the traditional time-based survey and certification regimes required by class and statutory regulations, and the qualification of surveyors and technical staff to face technology innovations should change too.
These matters will be discussed in detail within IACS and with interested stakeholders in the coming year.
Read more from IACS' 2023 Annual Review