Towards Real-Time Safety Monitoring for Autonomous Inland Waterway Vessels: The SeaGuard Tool

Autonomous operation has the potential to significantly enhance inland waterway transport by facilitating a shift to zero-emission propulsion and contributing to the competitiveness to alternative transport modes like road and rail. Autonomous vessels integrate hardware, advanced digital and software systems, as well as humans-in-the-loop and therefore constitute complex Socio-Technical Systems, whose safety can be affected by random faults, as well as vulnerabilities to intentional cyber-attacks. Despite technological advancements that allow for crewless or remotely controlled vessels, autonomous or remote control needs to be enhanced with risk awareness to ensure that associated uncertainties can be managed in real-time, and that autonomous operation is both safe and resilient. To address these challenges, the EC-funded, Horizon Europe project AUTOFLEX (AUTOnomous and small FLEXible vessels) develops the SeaGuard tool, which is intended to perform real-time monitoring and risk assessment given faults, unsafe system interactions, and cyber-security threats, with the aim to facilitate reverting to a safe state within a specified time window by proposing appropriate risk control measures in the form of decision support to operators and relevant stakeholders. To achieve this, SeaGuard integrates detection of anomalies either in the form of cyber-attacks or faults with real-time risk assessment and evaluation of candidate risk control measures. This paper describes the functions required for SeaGuard to accomplish its objectives, the approach that will be implemented for assessing the safety level, as well as a high-level overview of the supporting methodological framework. SeaGuard is expected to significantly contribute to the feasibility of autonomous operations in inland waterways and by extension to the competitiveness of this transport mode against land-based transportation.

Keywords: Autonomous vessels, Inland waterways transport, Safety assessment, Real-time monitoring, Resilience.