Digitization can improve the efficiency, safety and sustainability in shipping. When Mikael Lind today gave his promotional lecture to adjunct professor of maritime informatics at Chalmers, it was all about an area on the rise.

- Information sharing in shipping is an old tradition. Already thousands of years ago, sailors shared information with each other so that no one would run aground, Mikael Lind said in the introduction to his installation lecture.

Today, it is still about safety, but also about how shipping can be made more efficient and made more sustainable and resilient. With increased digitization, marine supply chains with higher predictability and transparency can be created. Resource and route optimization can improve both capital productivity and the energy efficiency of maritime transport. Port CDM (Port Collaborative Decision Making), the technology that Mikael Lind has been involved in developing and which uses timestamps to make port calls easier and smoother for everyone.

- If a captain learns that the process in the port is three hours late, he can slow down to arrive at the exact time for loading and unloading. In this way, fuel is saved and the world is less polluted.

There is a lot of work to do in this area. There are around 90,000 ships in the world, which together make around 20 million calls to 8,000 ports every year. But 80 percent of the ports today do not have the digital capacity required to meet the IT development that is now on the rise.
But how automated can the ports, which also become hubs in an intermodal transport system, become?

- A lot is being done to make ships autonomous, but I think the majority of the ships of the future will be so-called smart ships with supporting autonomous functions on board. I think the same development applies to the ports.

Mikael Lind is Senior Strategic Research Advisor at Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE).
He has been the lead author of many concept notes in marine and transport informatics taken up by the international trade press. Mikael has co-authored two books on Maritime Informatics, and the second book - with 130-plus authors from 25-plus nations – is expected to hit the shelves in the near future.Related content: Watch the promotional lecture