Assessing the Trustworthiness of Manned and Unmanned Ships

One of the key challenges ship builders will face when introducing more complex control, and increasing autonomy, is managing the large volume of information that will be available to operators (who may be in a remote location) and providing a level of confidence in the correct operation of the system. Furthermore, ship operators will need to understand the implications of any unexpected or anomalous behaviour in terms of the impact on the capability and operability of the ship.

This paper presents a novel strategy for aggregating the large amounts of information, and modulating the information presented to the operator through an independent system of “trustworthiness” assessment.

The trustworthiness concept provides a means by which complex decisions can be more easily assessed and actioned in the face of multiple sources of evidence. Complex decisions are broken down into a hierarchy of factors, each of which considers its own sources of evidence and the implication of this evidence on distinct aspects of the ship. In some cases, the data constituting a given source of evidence might not be reliable – it could be noisy, partial, or completely absent. If left un-monitored, this could result in a control system making an incorrect decision based on missing or poor quality input data.

The ability to assimilate data whilst conveying any uncertainty or absence of data can guard against poor decision-making. In the presence of a multitude of sensors that all contribute towards a single decision, the trustworthiness concept can combine the outputs, consider the full breadth of the available information, and process them with limited human oversight requirement, to ultimately make more informed decisions in a more timely manner.

This calculated value of trust provides useful contextual information valuable for many different purposes. For example, it can be used to modulate the amount of intervention required by the operator, and the level of detail of information presented to them. It can also be used to adjust the size of an exclusion zone for an autonomous ship, to reduce the likelihood of collisions.

Our paper/presentation will describe the assessment process and the proposed structure of trustworthiness as applied to the marine industry, and shall provide the audience with examples of how this could be implemented in practice to safely reduce manning requirements on autonomous, or semi-autonomous ships.