Operational management of autonomous ships: A need for new competence and resilience skills

The recent introduction of autonomous ships represents a radical and disruptive change in how work is organized in the maritime domain. It will lead to an increased distribution of work and decentralization of control that requires novel forms of collaboration and coordination. This requires new competencies among the various actors. We argue that the dynamic nature of autonomous ship operations requires the actors to handle system variability through a set of resilience skills. This theoretical paper explores how crew resource management training and the seamanship concept may contribute to develop these skills.