Haskoning and MSC Cruises boost port safety with first ship-side Smart Mooring platform
The new ship-side application, a world-first, aims to enhance safety, precision, and operational efficiency during port calls through advanced predictive insights.
Cruise ships, often more than 330 metres in length and carrying more than 8,000 passengers and crew, are moored in ports using high quality mooring lines, to keep the vessels safely alongside.
Haskoning’s Smart Mooring platform is a decision-support tool which integrates two decades of dynamic mooring analysis expertise with highly accurate, localised weather forecasts. The software predicts mooring forces and vessel motions.
This ship-side application provides vessels with predictive data to safely dock, manage line tensions in port and respond dynamically to weather changes – all from the bridge – to enhance safety for passengers, crew and port staff, and significantly reduce the risk of line or bollard failure, as well as potential damage to equipment and infrastructure.
We have tailored the Smart Mooring platform together with Haskoning to the specific operational needs of the eight different classes of our cruise ships. This provides our onboard bridge teams with actionable insights and the ability to reduce the reliance on static mooring or port-side analysis. This represents a positive step forward towards safer and smarter port operations.
“We are proud to work with MSC Cruises to bring this cutting-edge platform into active shipboard use,” said Coen Eggermont, Smart Mooring Lead at Haskoning. "We have created a solution finely tuned to the needs of cruise captains and their crew supporting their decisions with scientific insights, with safety and efficiency being paramount at every port call.”
The Smart Mooring software delivers:
- Continuous line forces monitoring, based on weather predictions and local characteristics
- Environmental input integration
- Predictive risk analysis for mooring failure, bollard overload or motions that could cause incidents
- Intuitive dashboards and alerts available from the bridge
