The Human Element as a Key Driver in the Future Shipping Industry

The world has witnessed four industrial revolutions, and the latest one, Industry 4.0 has led to paradigm shifts in all industries, including maritime logistics. Digitalisation and automation, as the main facets of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, are disrupting all aspects of maritime logistics by connecting operators, data, and machines to create intelligent systems (Kucukaltan, Saatcioglu, Irani, & Tuna, 2022). Maritime transport is experiencing technological disruption resulting in, for example, traditional shipping being re-imagined towards fully autonomous shipping to embrace sustainable and resilient maritime logistics and supply chains (Emad, Enshaei, & Ghosh, 2021). The intent of autonomous shipping is to improve the efficiency and safety of work processes by transferring seafarers’ roles to advanced machines in order to decrease the vulnerability of systems to human mistakes. However, this created a false perception that diminished the importance of the human role in the future autonomous shipping (Emad, Khabir, & Shahbakhsh, 2020). In the imagined future with expected technological development human need to constantly interact with intelligent machines and advanced technologies (Shahbakhsh, Emad, & Cahoon, 2021). Research shows that marine operators and seafarers, as critical players in the shipping industry, will remain in the loop and need new technical and non-technical skills and competencies to operate semi-autonomous and autonomous systems (Emad, 2020). Of interest however, current research mainly concentrates on the development and implementation of advanced technologies of autonomous systems thus, there is a gap in research about human element and the future role of marine operators. This paper reports on our research findings on seafarers’ training needs and challenges while transition to autonomous shipping.