Imagine a shipbuilder with lots of constructed vessels currently sailing around the world.

Imagine this shipbuilder wants to keep an eye on all these vessels, their performance, and their equipment status, so he knows when the ships need maintenance.

Rolloos, together with its partner OSIsoft, has designed a solution for Royal IHC. For this shipbuilder, we developed a fleet-wide remote vessel-monitoring platform, based on OSIsoft’s PI System.

The system is now in use for IHC’s Beaver cutting section dredgers. Cutting section dredgers are usually put into use in many different, harsh circumstances on very remote locations. On top of that, they have to make long operating hours. This results in three main issues:

1. Updating stakeholders on project progress is challenging, as owners have no data-driven insights in performance, project progress, and costs.
2. Being unable to deliver the necessary and timely technical support in very remote areas – with bad reception.
3. Monitoring of key engines, pump, and other components is not possible in a (near) real-time way.

The best way to deal with these issues is to use the knowledge, experience, and lessons learned from previous situations. For this purpose, large amounts of data are available, but the challenge lies in the fact that this data originates from various suppliers. This makes it difficult to obtain all the necessary information in one integrated and easy-to-read database. With Rolloos’ new vessel-monitoring platform, data collected from all ships can be stored and integrated into one cloud-based system that is open to all relevant stakeholders to collect and analyse the information for their specific purpose. This could be the owner of the vessels, or Royal IHC as maintenance partner.

Operators can with PI keep an eye on all IHC-constructed dredgers in use worldwide, simply from their office desks. For their convenience, the system itself is able to collect, synchronise, analyse, and interpret all data available from various sources and protocols at high speeds, showing the real-time status of a vessel in a hierarchical asset framework. To give a practical example: the system shows the vessel, the specific pump on this vessel, the specific sensor inside the pump, and it alerts the viewer when something could go wrong. So even a person without specific technical expertise can read the information.

The key advantage of Rolloos’ system is that it can be easily integrated with other applications, such as advanced analytics tools and specific management information dashboards. For Royal IHC’s Beavers, vessel owners are continuously updated, and IHC is able to provide remote support and the identification of the parts most likely to break down – thus in need of immediate replacement – has become straightforward thanks to implementing the PI system. Additionally, the new system enables further investigation of the specific origin of the failure. In conclusion, the company learns from the system how to improve the performance and efficiency of the vessels in its maintenance portfolio, resulting in considerable cost savings for customers.

Other impressive features of PI is that it requires low computing power, it is suitable for any type of ship, and it only needs a small amount of custom programming. The design developed for one ship can be used for all other vessels in the ship owner’s fleet. We can in this way easily add value for our customers, keeping costs low and efficiency high.

With OSIsoft’s PI system, we provide customers with a useful open infrastructure that can be used for ample other current and future functionalities.

This may sound too good to be true, but it is certainly possible.

Contact us to find out how.

Visit our dedicated webpage for more information: www.rolloos.com/en/solutions/data-analytics/remote-monitoring/