Connect and Protect: Requirements for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship in Urban Passenger Transportation

Abstract

Recent innovations in the smart city domain include new autonomous transportation solutions such as buses and cars, while Autonomous Passenger Ships (APS) are being considered for carrying passengers across urban waterways. APS integrate several interconnected systems and services that are required to communicate in a reliable manner to provide safe and secure real-time operations. In this paper, we discuss the APS context, stakeholders, regulations, standards and functions in order to identify communication and cybersecurity requirements towards designing a secure communication architecture suitable for APS.

Communication architecture for autonomous passenger ship

“…Specifically, the notion for the decomposition of navigation functions is influenced by the proposed operational modes by Rødseth et al (16), functions proposed in the MUNIN project (33) as well as DNV.GL's proposed "autoremote" operational mode (34). For the second goal function, the identification of functions and sub-functions was based on the established communication requirements (10). Each function and sub-function was derived to address a certain requirement until all requirements are addressed.…”

“…Initially, the identified system structure reflected in the ST in Figure 3 was distributed across the APS context identified in (10). The distribution was based on the appropriate interactions across the different system functions, which are reflected in Figure 6.…”

“…The extracted requirements were proposed by the stakeholders with a focus on regulatory compliance, functionality, reliability and safety of autonomous ships. The work in (10) leads to the conclusion that ICT technologies implemented in contemporary ships are not sufficient for autonomous all-electric passenger ferries for urban water transport, given the operational conditions and requirements of the latter. Accordingly, in this paper, a tailored Communication Architecture is proposed, that aims to satisfy the communication requirements established in (10), and to address the needs of the various stakeholders.…”

“…The work in (10) leads to the conclusion that ICT technologies implemented in contemporary ships are not sufficient for autonomous all-electric passenger ferries for urban water transport, given the operational conditions and requirements of the latter. Accordingly, in this paper, a tailored Communication Architecture is proposed, that aims to satisfy the communication requirements established in (10), and to address the needs of the various stakeholders. The architecture is designed so as to include elements to allow the design and development of a complementary security architecture that will address the security requirements established in (10).…”

“…The reference architecture proposed by Rødseth et al ( 16) was found to be the most relevant to our work since it addressed several of the communication requirements established in (10). This architecture constitutes a significant part of the current state of the art, but it lacks certain elements necessary in the context of the APS case.…”