A Shipbuilder’s Digital Journey: Building the Internet of Things at Sea

At Austal, the West Australian builder of high speed ships, we believe that the next leap forwards in the efficiency and comfort of our ships will be driven by data. For the last twelve months we’ve been building a brand new system for our ships which will fulfil this vision: MARINELINK Smart.

A small hand-picked team of the company’s best engineers has been working at the University of Western Australia to build an AWS cloud-based system to gather and analyse data from in-service ships. Ships with MARINELINK Smart fitted will prompt the crew on-board to alter speed, route, and on-board systems to save fuel and improve the comfort of passengers and crew. MARINELINK Smart combines data from the environment, ship’s systems and off-board sources to achieve this.

We started our trial close to home by testing key features of the system with Rottnest Express. Today we are receiving live streaming data from ships in-service around the world.

In this presentation we will share the challenges in deploying an IOT solution at sea, lessons learned in cloud-based automation and the parallels we see to other industries with large time-series data derived from real-time operations.