Modelling the processes of taking over the watch from an autonomous navigation system

The maritime industry is striving towards increasing levels of autonomy within the field of navigation. However, fully autonomous vessel navigation requires an extraordinarily complex system. As a step towards full autonomy and to reduce system complexity, nautical officers should still be available on board to take over the watch from the autonomous system in situations, in which human intervention is required. Therefore, a highly advanced human-machine interface (HMI) is essential, which supports nautical officers in retrieving all necessary information in order to manage the takeover. The implementation of the autonomous system and introduction of an HMI creates new processes, which need to be defined. In this paper, we portray our approach to define the processes for watch handovers from the autonomous system to nautical officers by investigating current watch handover processes. Subsequently, the resulting process models are described and discussed.