# Human Factor Issues in Remote Ship Operations: Lesson Learned by Studying Different Domains
## 5 Conclusions  
Remote ship operations eliminate the role of humans in guiding ships on board, but they do not eliminate the human factors involved in monitoring and even--when necessary--controlling them, as human operators provide these interventions from the SCC. This paper provides insights for the design of SCCs and the understanding of humans as a critical sub-system in the context of remote ship operations. Remote operators have to gain an adequate level of SA and sense of ship during monitoring and controlling the vessel in order to make effective decisions. Hence, onboard autonomous systems need to provide updated data to the SCC via sensors and satellite communications, which leads to other human factor challenges such as communication problems, latency, lack of direct sense of ship and higher workloads compared to onboard operations. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**SA**} & \multirow{2}{*}{**Teamwork**} & **Skill** & **High Level of** & **Communication** & **Decision** \\  & & **Degradation** & **Workload** & **Challenges** & **Making** \\ \hline \multirow{4}{*}{**Linguistic Problems**} & Linguistic problems affect effective teamwork negatively & Linguistic problems affect teamwork & Linguistic problems increase communication challenges & Linguistic problems negatively affect decision making \\ \hline \multirow{4}{*}{**trust**} & Linguistic problems affect effective teamwork & Linguistic problems affect teamwork & Linguistic problems increase communication challenges & Linguistic problems negatively affect decision making \\  & & & & challenges & making in a negative way \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: _Cont._Current forums of autonomous and unmanned vessels state that operators in SCCs will be assigned to monitor more than one vessel. While the situation team would take full direct remote control of one vessel in specific situations, operators would be exposed to a high workload, which is a human factor issue in need of greater attention. On the other hand, it is clear that the working environment in the SCC is completely different from the traditional onboard bridge and there is no direct connection between the operators and the vessel. SCC operators rely on sensor information and only onshore instruments; they have to work with screens and new types of interfaces. This implies the importance of human-machine interactions and how human-machine interfaces affect the operator's behavior. Additionally, human-machine interfaces have a direct effect on the level of operator's boredom and fatigue in addition to workload and working hours. Trust in the SCCs is another human factor issue; the main challenge is operators' trust in sensor information and eliminating factors that negatively affect the operators' trust. On the other hand, a high level of trust over a long period of time leads to another human factor challenge, namely skill degradation. Situation team operators must be able to take full remote control over the vessel when needed, but this is infrequent. Decision-making and teamwork also influence the process of monitoring and controlling the vessel in SCCs. Other human factor issues affect decision-making both directly and indirectly. The 13 identified human factor issues in the current study are as follows:  
* Situation awareness (SA)
* High workload
* Trust
* Boredom
* fatigue
* Skill degradation
* human-machine interfaces
* Lack of direct sensory
* Communication challenges
* Decision making
* linguistic problems
* Cultural problems
* Teamwork  
Most of the human factor challenges have been identified based on suggestive models and qualitative research conducted in remote control domains. Although few human factors have been tested in the real world with large and quantitative samples, this study provides a new perspective for human factor models, and future research should address experiments in the real world with large samples.