Ecological Collaborative Support System for maritime navigation teams
Authors: Fernando Plácido Da Conceição Vítor , Marques Rafaela , Água Pedro , Dahlman Joakim 
Published: July 2023

Maritime navigation is a demanding and complex domain that involves
risks for people, the environment, and economic activity. The tasks
associated with its execution require advanced training, expertise,
experience, and a collaborative Navigation Team. Furthermore, naval
operations demand higher readiness, accuracy, and resilience due to
additional constraints. The response to these challenges has been
integrating further automation and information systems. However, the
effectiveness of innovative trends had been questioned by recent naval
accidents like those involving the US and Norwegian naval ships.In bridge
crews, collaboration is progressively more dependent on technological means
since they are the information sources, and team members need to share and
exchange different information formats besides audio. Furthermore, the
increasing number of control functions and information systems required to
strengthen the bridge situational awareness came with an additional cost to
human operators. Therefore, navigation teams need further assistance in this
challenging context to achieve a consistent and coherent situational
awareness regarding the integrated systems in use, comprising technological
and human agents' activities. The proposed solution under development is a
Collaborative Decision Support System (C-DSS) fitted to the vessels' bridge
systems requirements to reduce the cognitive workload, enhance collaboration
between team members and information systems, and strengthen team
situational awareness and sensemaking.Several studies addressed the need to
provide enhanced interfaces with higher levels of abstraction
representation, adjusted to the changed role of human operators, easily
adaptable; improved collaboration between humans and automated agents, and
superior information integration from internal and external environments.
The most critical property of interfaces is to simplify the "discovery of
the meaningfulness" of the problem space. World's representation should
include the relevant and critical elements tailored to the task, augmenting
the interaction experience, increasing the decision-making skill, and
assisting the discovery of significant phenomena. The used methodology was
an anthropocentric approach to innovation - design thinking. The process was
performed with five phases: empathy, definition, idealization, prototyping
and tests. Interface design prototypes were made with Mockups, covering the
following several team roles. Usability tests, questionnaires and interviews
were applied to validate and assess the C-DSS. Five focus group tests were
made iteratively, with fifteen SMEs, twice with navigators, and once with
SMEs from the other role, three in each iterative evaluation test, with a
1.5-hour duration. Following a snowball selection principle, participants
were recruited from the Portuguese navy with the organization's guidance to
ensure that all participants had an extensive seagoing experience.At the
current stage of the C-DSS development, the results indicate significant
potential for interface strategies. Results show that end-users would like
to have the C-DSS, considering it innovative, friendly, easy to learn and
with the information they need. The usability test allowed us to correct and
improve numerous user interface design issues. The main difficulties
maintained in terms of usability were related to recording data. The
envisaged C-DSS is fitted to the vessels' bridge systems requirements
embracing several prerequisites like being portable and customizable,
enabling goals and priorities' management, logging performance and
behavioural data, sharing different information formats, supporting
information synchronization, providing situational awareness information
about the system and operators.This study contributes to the understanding
of the collaborative decision-making process in navigation teams through two
objectives: first, systematising the main difficulties and challenges and,
second, presenting a desirable solution, possible from a technological and
financially viable point of view. The developed prototype has four distinct
graphic interfaces, that complement each other and are oriented to the
context of the user's role, based on the continuous contribution of target
users, that is, elements belonging to navigation teams. The contributions
allowed an improved understanding of the problem, idealise the solution, and
improve the C-DSS, from design to insertion and adaptation of new
functions.In the validation process of the prototype, it was found that the
experts would like to use the C-DSS, stating that they would have greater
autonomy and, even so, would be able to make an exceptional contribution to
the team. Finally, the design thinking approach provided a basis for
continuous feedback from end-users, becoming a twofold benefit by triggering
new ideas of possible solutions to be deployed onboard.