Participatory Approach to Sustainable Voyage Planning for Unmanned Vessels

Research in the design and development of sustainable operations in the maritime industry has received a great deal of attention in the recent past. Increased demand of sustainability, growth, skilled workforce, and competitiveness of maritime industry paved the way for unmanned vessels. This paper reports a participatory design process, where discussion emerged on sustainable voyage planning for unmanned vessels. The participatory approach in this study included a Futures Wheel workshop, semi-structured interviews, and a scenario workshop. These helped us to identify opportunities to improve voyage sustainability by optimizing the vessel size and efficient scheduling, and to include them in the use scenarios that guide the next steps of the solution design.