Samsung Heavy Industries Upgrades Smart Ship Solution with AWS

Amazon Web Services Korea (AWS Korea), an Amazon.com company, announced that Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI), one of the world’s largest ship and offshore equipment manufacturers, has upgraded its smart ship solution, SVESSEL, on the world’s leading cloud. The SVESSEL solution now has digitized applications related to vessel repair and maintenance so ship operators can improve the quality of maintenance service while lowering costs. Using the breadth and depth of AWS services, including machine learning (ML), data analysis, and communications services, SVESSEL enables customers to collect data from ships at sea in real time, check the status of a ship’s equipment remotely, and deliver maintenance support faster and more accurately to help SHI’s customers operate a productive ship fleet with minimum downtime.

In 2018, SHI selected AWS as the company’s preferred cloud provider to develop a next-generation smart ship solution to monitor the entire life cycle of a ship, from construction and delivery, to operation and decommissioning after use. As part of SHI’s digital transformation plans, the ship builder recently upgraded its innovative, cloud-native solution to improve the ship maintenance process, reduce claim processing time by an average of one month, and improve work efficiency by more than 20%. Previously, it took an average of two months to identify problems, supply materials, and conduct repairs as engineers had to physically board each vessel to check the condition of a ship’s equipment and deliver maintenance information via email or satellite phone.

Using Amazon SageMaker, a service to build, train, and deploy ML models for virtually any use case, SVESSEL can now monitor the vibrations and power data of rotating equipment on ships in real time to identify potential wear and tear, more accurately predict the timing of equipment maintenance, and alert ship crew for repairs before equipment fails. Using Amazon Lex, a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text, SHI built a chatbot to provide operators with their ships’ real-time location, weather conditions, and major alarm information, which enables them to better understand the condition of their fleets. Using Amazon Chime SDK, a set of real-time communications components, SHI was able to integrate messaging, audio, video, and screen-sharing capabilities into SVESSEL to enable engineers on shore to check the equipment status and provide repair guidance remotely to engineers on board. SHI uses Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, a massively scalable and durable real-time data streaming service, to power a new Surround View feature that enables operators to monitor a vessel’s surroundings day or night with a 360-degree overhead view without blind spots. Surround View is particularly useful when a vessel is operating in narrow waterways or berthing.

“AWS enables our customers to smartly manage the entire life cycle of their ships,” said HyunJo Kim, Head of Ship and Ocean Research Center at Samsung Heavy Industries. “Because we built our SVESSEL smart ship solution using AWS services, we can innovate faster than anyone else to enable our customers to service their fleets faster, more accurately, and at lower cost, often with no need for physical boarding of the vessel. Through SVESSEL, customers can keep vessel operations safe and economical, conduct repairs and maintenance more conveniently, and combat rising costs. The upgraded smart ship maintenance system can also reduce claim processing time by an average of one month compared with the previous system, and improve work efficiency by more than 20%. We plan to help our customers further optimize their ships by integrating more advanced AWS services like Internet of Things into SVESSEL in the future.”

“Samsung Heavy Industries continues to develop new features for its smart ship solution, and we are excited that AWS capabilities play an integral part in achieving this,” said Kee Ho Ham, Managing Director of AWS Korea. “AWS’s unmatched portfolio of cloud services helps to enable Samsung Heavy Industries to develop new approaches to solving meaningful customer challenges, like monitoring and servicing a ship remotely while it’s in transit. We will continue to support Samsung Heavy Industries as it uses the cloud to help its customers navigate their shipping fleets more efficiently.”