ABSTRACT
The motivation for autonomous commercial ships stems in part from a desire to reduce costs, enhance safety and decrease environmental risk associated with shipping operations. Unmanned ships do not inherently require the features and systems necessary to support human life at sea; therefore, cost avoidance may be achieved by eliminating the non-recurring costs associated with their design, development, test and maintenance. Autonomous ships provide an entirely new platform upon which innovative business models can be developed to advance economical modes of transporting goods and materials between points, to leverage business opportunities through digitalization and to monetize data pertaining to shipping operations. The avoidance of costs for human features and support systems simplifies ship requirements and can make the design portion of the lifecycle shorter and less expensive than is normally the case. The monetization of ship-acquired data has huge economic potential to gain operational efficiencies and also to expand revenue sources.
