"Smart Ships": Mobile Applications, Cloud and Bigdata on Marine Traffic for Increased Safety and Optimized Costs Operations

The increasing maritime traffic, due to worldwide trade, tends to increase the risk of wrecks, collisions and contacts between ships, producing sinking with high economical costs, major environmental impacts and unfortunately the loss of lives. There is continuous news in the media reporting about these issues. Governments, captains, vessel traffic centres, harbors, safety and rescue forces need better tools to prevent accidents, increase safety and optimize operational costs. In this review, current key technologies used on ships and shore stations are displayed and it is shown how new smart technologies on vessels and the use of big data and analytic tools could improve the safety of the sailors. Unmanned/Remote Pilot Ships are going to be introduced, too and finally the Sail tracker project, the initial development of a smart ship solution to upload and share information to the cloud to be used by cognitive and analytic tools.