Meaningful Human Control in Autonomous Shipping: An Overview

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the aspects related to meaningful human control in autonomous shipping. Autonomy is described as a multi-faceted construct including self-sufficiency and self-directedness, which are related to a range of conditions a ship can deal with. This means that autonomy levels will vary in different operational situations. As a consequence, active operator involvement and workload will fluctuate and will sometimes be unpredictable. In case of supervising multiple ships, it is not feasible to maintain a minimal level of situation awareness of all the ships. In order to facilitate operator situation awareness recovery and other human-automation collaboration principles an Intelligent Operator Support System concept is outlined. Whether the large-scale application of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships will provide equivalent safety and resilience levels will largely depend on the intelligence of the onboard control systems, the design quality of the human-autonomy collaboration system, and the competence and training level of the SC-operators.