Maritime hackathon comes up with safety and efficiency ideas

Called "Hack the Sea" and held recently at the Interschalt Maritime Education & Training Centre (MET) in Schenefeld, Germany, the event brought together ten teams totalling over 70 participants, including 33 hackers with wide experience in software, technology, design and business development.
"The participants had brilliant ideas already at the beginning of the event, and the excellent quality of the outcomes surprised us,” said Alexander Nürnberg, senior vice president for technology and R&D at MacGregor. “In addition to exciting demonstrations with state-of-the-art technology, we saw many solutions that truly address our customers' current challenges as well as their future needs. Many concepts have high potential to become real products."
The ten teams worked on three challenge areas, namely increasing safety on vessels, increasing fleet efficiency through optimised maintenance of installed products, and improving vessels' environmental sustainability. The participants represented companies and individuals, including start-up and SME companies as well as universities.
The teams had access to many MacGregor data sources and application programming interfaces (APIs), and could use the offshore crane operations simulator C-How and the vessel monitoring and reporting software Bluetracker. Various other tools and devices were also provided by the event technology partners. Additionally, the participants had an opportunity to experience how it feels to operate a vessel with the bridge simulators at the Interschalt MET.
"Creating new service and business concepts to meet our customers' current and future needs is essential," said Michel van Roozendaal, president of MacGregor and a member of the jury. "In the hackathon, we experienced how these needs can be satisfied with novel technology solutions, for example by utilising and analysing the data from different sources. It was delighting to see how many teams chose to develop safety-related concepts aiming at improving safety on board the vessel as well as in the ports. There were also interesting proposals that looked into general industry challenges, for example reducing waiting times in ports. Other interesting concepts aimed at visualising vessel operations, crew locations and safe crane operating conditions.
"We were very pleased to see that all teams had customer and business value high in their thinking. Customer and business value was one of the key criteria when choosing the winner of our Hack the Sea. The winning concept was presented by the team Cybercom, which developed the Apps for Ships solution. Apps for Ships is a platform for rapid application development, not just for MacGregor, but also for MacGregor customers to build the applications on. The proposed concept supports MacGregor's strategic targets very well."