In December, Lighthouse published research results on how fire safety on ships can be improved with the help of AI and big data. This has led to tangible benefits. One of the participants in the study, the fire safety company Consilium, hopes to be able to deliver a visualization tool to help facilitate the decision-making process in the event of a fire on board.

Consilium has been supplying fire and gas detection systems to ships all over the world since the 70s.

“We work with everything from cruise ships to tugboats. We operate in the entire field, but are market leaders in roro and ropax. We have a good portfolio of products”, says Kenth Sandell, head of innovation at Consilium.

But a portfolio can always be improved. According to Kenth Sandell, Consilium has been working with big data for four to five years and already has products that can integrate and visualize certain systems on board – for example fire doors, ventilation and sprinkler systems.

“We have a platform and can have prototypes ready to run this year. We will hopefully have finished products on the market next year.”

The visualization tools are only the first steps in the vision of the fully autonomous fire protection systems described in the report.

“We have benefited from the report work on two levels. First of all, it has given us a completely new vision of what the fire safety system of the future can look like. Now we have a much broader picture of both how far we can go and how far we want to go. This, in turn, has created a new idea and innovation mindset with us, which has meant that we are now taking the first steps towards the autonomous fire protection system of the future.”

A future step for Consilium will be to investigate the possibilities of creating a system for smart and connected cargo - something that, according to the report, is an important part of the fire safety system of the future. But it's a sensitive area, as cargo owners don't necessarily want to reveal what's in their containers.

“It is of course a challenge. There are neither standards nor regulations, but we will still go ahead and take a closer look at it, says Kenth Sandell.”

Footnote. The pre-study study AI-based Fire safety system using Big Data has been done within the framework of the Swedish Transport Administration's branch program Sustainable shipping and written by Mikael Hägg, RISE, David Schmidt RISE, Johan Gregersson, Chalmers and Kenth Sandell, Consilium Safety Group.

To the report and earlier article