A concept of agent system for marine engine operation on the training ship

We propose a new concept of a support system for marine engine operation onboard ship. In the concept an agent system is introduced, which has a man-machine interface of speech communication and acts as the skilled engineer by using the chief engineer's knowledge. In the near future, the marine engine system will be operated by a deck officer at the bridge who does not have enough experience. To cope with the emergency and normal start-stop situation, several intelligent control systems are developed, but it can only change the engine load and indicate the failure parts. We have proposed and have been developing the Chief Engineer System (CE-SYS) which instructs the crew about the preferable operation during each step of the engine conditions. CE-SYS is a computer agent system, which has the experienced chief engineer's behavior. CE-SYS creates a comment from the condition of the engine automatically and tells it to the crew as an instruction. CE-SYS is equipped with a learning function of the crew's ability and personality through speech communication to generate an appropriate instruction. This makes the efficiency of the data collection for control. We confirmed the effectiveness of the experiment on the training ship Yuge Maru.