Hoegh Autoliners has agreed to roll out Kongsberg Digital's Vessel Insight platform on nearly its entire fleet.
An early adopter of the Asker-based industrial digitalisation outfit’s data collection and processing platform, Hoegh Autoliners intends to put the system on its entire fleet, including its 12 dual-fueled ammonia-ready newbuildings but excluding some of its older fleet.
Hoegh Autoliners chief executive Andreas Enger told TradeWinds the intention was to collect more data and do more with it.
“This is just an endless set of opportunities: Digitising the vessel operations, digitising the cargo management, adding to safety,” he said.
“It’s a pretty broad range of use cases for this and what we’re doing here is putting it into a structure that allows us to move broader and faster.
“We’ve gradually increased our ambitions on what we want to digitize on board.”
The Oslo car carrier owner was the first shipowner to start using Vessel Insight, using it for things like weather routing and monitoring equipment.
But expanding their use of a data platform like Kongsberg Digital’s might allow Hoegh Autoliners to do things like monitor the temperature on electric vehicle batteries carried on board — an issue the International Union of Marine Insurers recently suggested could pose an issue for car carriers.
“We have good experiences, but the digital space is like, the more you do, the better you understand the gap from where you should have been,” said Enger, whose company has the ambition of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2040 in keeping with demands from automakers.
Kongsberg Digital chief executive Shane McArdle said his company needs partners like Hoegh Autoliners to push digitalisation forward.
“We're a provider of industrial software, digital solutions for the maritime industry, but we need a partner who can lean in, which Hoegh [Autoliners] has been because the ambitions have been there,” he said.
He said Hoegh is willing to experiment, which pushes Kongsberg Digital to improve its offerings, which for the Vessel Insight platform includes data collection and storage. From there, users can access a suite of applications to interpret that data.
Some of those applications were developed by Kongsberg and others by third parties like Nautilus Labs, ioCurrents and ABS.
“The fundamental characteristic of the partnership is pushing each other to improve the industry,” McArdle said.
