{mprestriction ids="1,2"}The Japanese shipping company currently it has more than 100 vessels installed with the satcom system, but intends to now move forward with installation of Fleet Xpress across its entire managed and owned fleet of bulk carriers, tankers, pure car carriers and LNG carriers.

The fleet-wide commitment is part of MOL’s plan to scale up its digital activities, as the shipping company looks to implement Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced data analytics technologies to drive improvements in safety, efficiency and environmental performance.

One digitalisation project already underway at the company is MOL’s partnership with Mitsui E&S Shipbuilding and Weathernews on the development of a new Fleet Optimal Control Unified System (FOCUS) platform.

In its initial stages FOCUS will see detailed voyage and engine data gathered from 150 vessels and stored in the Cloud, where it will be made available for analysis to drive operational efficiency and propulsion performance improvements.

“As satellite communications technology has grown dramatically over the past decade, we have adopted VSAT from an early stage for e-mail communication and sharing of images between ship to shore, and now we can also monitor equipment,” said MOL, in a statement.

“The continued roll-out of Fleet Xpress will help implement our forecast maintenance solutions through our FOCUS platform, and we will continue to develop our use of satellite communication in the future to help to continue to digitalise our vessels.”

New engine health monitoring and fault diagnostics, ’digital twins’ to support vessel maintenance management, augmented reality and other remote visualisation techniques that supplement ship to shore interactions are among a range of additional ideas also under consideration at MOL, the company said.{/mprestriction}