This was a game changer in its day, and the same methodology has been in place ever since. Most vessels that now go on charter send a short email (even this is relatively new – it wasn’t so long ago that telex was the norm) communicating how many miles they have travelled, how much fuel they have on board, where they’re heading, and to report on the local weather. This is used as the basis of measuring their fuel consumption, and that accumulated data is then used to assess the vessel’s fuel performance.

If you think of it, it’s a little insane that if you buy a car today, it’s constantly reporting back to the engineering centre and its engineers. Whereas today, a large tanker or bulk carrier, in most cases, still relies on that century-old noon reporting system as the foundation for how they are commercially operated.

What we are doing with SkyLight is determining the vessel’s fuel consumption curve. When you undertake noon reporting, you use the average weather conditions during that 24-hour period. Now, you don’t need to be a meteorologist to realise that weather can change quite a bit over a whole day and night, so such averages are hardly precise. By moving to four times a day, you have much better granularity. With SkyLight, we take five-minute location readings, and then automatically enrich that data with the current weather conditions. No one could manually report every five minutes, because, as an officer on board, you would be doing nothing else. SkyLight automates this function and makes it a part of a vessel’s normal operations, with all the huge advantages it confers now being simply taken for granted.

How will the system benefit Wärtsilä’s marine customers?

Jan Wilhelmsson: SkyLight actually addresses the way shipping is being conducted as a business. With SkyLight, ship operators can cost-effectively monitor their fleet and compare the performance of each vessel in detail. Our software keeps records of the ships’ performance, enabling more prompt reporting, planning and cost optimisation. Fundamentally, we’re allowing ship operators to manage their business more effectively.

Critical to this is the accuracy of the data we extract from the vessel. For various reasons, the precision of our readings is streets ahead of that of any competing offering at this price point (which, in any case, would often have to consist of two or more separate solutions from different providers).

The next advantage is our modelling. We know for a fact that a very large portion of ship speed logs contain major errors. With Skylight we realised that rather than trying to correct these systems, we could just create these values using the correction-model system we had developed for our previous products, which we now refer to as “artificial sensing”. So, instead of actually measuring the speed by physically having an expensive installation on board that is integrated with the speed log and the navigation system, we use modelling to calculate it. Because we have the vessel’s movements, and we have all the weather data, the sea state and the tidal current, we know the difference between speed and distance through water, and the distance and speed over ground. And thus we can calculate the water track without resorting to the log.

All of these factors combined lead to far greater accuracy than has been seen elsewhere in the industry without major installations. And there is a very simple correlation between the accuracy of our data, and our customer’s ability to optimise their operations based upon it.