Sea Technology

20 st / March 2017 www.sea-technology.com but we believe that a test bed currently planned for the U.S.A. will help illuminate the poten- tial for this capability and could provide benets for the rapid detection, communication and resolution of charting discrepan- cies. IENC Background In 1993, the MV Mauvilla, a towboat pushing six barges, got lost in the fog and collided with a railroad bridge on the Big Bayou Canot near Mobile, Ala- bama, causing the bridge to become misaligned by approximately 3 ft. Eight minutes later, the Amtrak Sunset Lim- ited passenger train derailed on the bridge and plunged into the waterway, killing 47 people and injuring 103 others. The proximate cause of the accident was found to be that the towboat did not have nautical charts on board, and due to the foggy con- ditions, the pilot, without realizing it, turned into the Big Bayou Canot, an area where barges are prohibited. As a result of its investigation of the accident, the Na- tional Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE): "Promote, in cooperation with the U.S. Coast Guard, the development and application of low-cost electronic charting navigation devices for inland rivers." As a follow-up, Congress directed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to develop IENC to cover the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Since 2002, USACE has produced 107 IENC cells covering more than 7,200 mi. on 20 different rivers. Electronic chart coverage exists for approximately 98 percent of all commercially navigable inland waterways. All charts are presently produced to the IENC 2.3 Product Specication and are updated and maintained on a monthly basis. T he Automatic Identication Sys- tem (AIS) has been mandated for carriage aboard certain vessels and in voluntary use aboard many other vessels around the world for more than 10 years. In that time, it has been proven to be an invalu- able source of information for its intended purposes—ship-to-ship collision avoidance, use in vessel trafc services (VTS), and as a tool for coastal states to monitor vessel trafc in and adjacent to their waters. These benets of AIS have come primarily from the standard messages trans- mitted by vessels—e.g., their location, course and speed—that are part of the AIS standard. However, additional advances have been made in the development and use of other AIS mes- sages—called application-specic messages (ASM)—that allow for communication of a wide variety of additional information via AIS. These developments have been aimed at communicating navigational information from shore to ships, such as weather observations, waterway status, and information on hazards and other navigationally signicant information. In addition, it is possible for information collected by vessels to be transmitted to other vessels that may benet from it, as well as to shore authorities who can act upon it. The potential exists for the use of AIS capabilities to transmit information on discrepancies in an inland electronic navi- gational chart (IENC). The discrepancy information would be noted using the vessel's electronic charting system (ECS), encapsulated in a dened AIS ASM, transmitted by the ves- sel's AIS transceiver, received by shore-side AIS receiving stations and delivered to the appropriate charting authority for action. There are a variety of technical, policy and procedural is- sues that need to be investigated, examined and addressed, Improving Navigation Safety with Better Charts Prototyping AIS for Ship Reporting of ENC Discrepancies #Z%FOJTF-B%VFt#SJBO5FUSFBVMU Overview of the shore-based AIS service.

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