Ship Fuel Monitoring System for Ship Management Services Company
Ship Fuel Monitoring System for Ship Management Services Company
At a glance
Focus: Ship Fuel Monitoring System for Ship Management Services Company.
Challenge: The Ship Management Services Company had problems in maintaining the inventory of the fuel consumption
Approach: Based on the client’s requirements, Utthunga suggested that a customized uConnect is required that is basically an edge device/gateway used for any IoT platform to connect to field
Impact: Customer has complete fuel ledger with transparency in fuel stock.
Utthunga Technologies
Our client is a major Ship Management Services company They presently manage around 40 vessels for ship owners from Japan, Singapore, Greece, Isle of Man and Croatia. Their offices are located in Singapore, Norway, India, Philippines and Vietnam with representatives in China and Japan as well. Their complete range of ship management involves managing most of the ships complete life cycle, from allocation of blueprint, through construction, operational life, dry-docking, midlife modernization, life extensions and ultimately recycling.
Business challenge
The Ship Management Services Company had problems in maintaining the inventory of the fuel consumption in their ships/vessels. There was high probability of fuel consumption data erroneously being entered by the ship attendants. The accuracy in fuel consumption data was also missing. Hence, the customer wanted to track the consumption of fuel in an automated manner.
Industry 4.0 solution
Utthunga team worked on the uConnect device to meet the customer requirements with below features:
Tamper proof data acquisition and storage
Fuel consumption calculation (for different fuel types) logic based on data collected from different flow meters
Secure data transmission via Restful webserver
In-device portal to access flow consumption in the ship
Audit Trails
Publishing the data to a centralized server for analysis and reports
Based on the client’s requirements, Utthunga suggested that a customized uConnect is required that is basically an edge device/gateway used for any IoT platform to connect to field devices and other industrial assets. The device is fixed to the main and auxiliary engines to read data from the flow meters. uConnect edge application then processes the data and publishes it securely to a web server.
The basic approach and implementation methodology used by Utthunga to resolve the client’s challenge is as follows.
uConnect / Edge Device
Collects fuel flow reading from flow meters over MODBUS
Captures analog, digital input, RPM data
Captures marine parameters
GPS Signals
Speed
Gyro
Anemometer readings
Monitors dual fuel types
HSFO
LSGO
Analytics application running on the edge device
Fuel consumption is calculated periodically and posted to cloud server for offshore monitoring
Data posted in XML format using REST API
Store and forward in case of network dis-connectivity
The customized uConnect edge device was installed in 20 ships and data is continuously acquired and sent to a centralized server
One-click software updates to the edge device is through a portable pen drive which is an easy, simple and mobile way for ship maintenance.
Key benefits
| Area | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Operational Benefit | Customer has complete fuel ledger with transparency in fuel stock |
| Visibility & Analytics | Ship movement and all critical parameters are monitored by the stake holders |
| Visibility & Analytics | Centralized server to access the data from all the ships. |