Road to Shipyard 4.0: The state of play, a brief history of maritime developments, and a future roadmap Focusing on the Baltic Sea and Shipyards

Report, 2020

ECOPRODIGI is an initiative of the EU-Interreg Baltic Sea Programme, whose mission is to improve and promote the eco-efficiency of shipping and maritime operations. This report is a product of the work package 4 (WP4); a foresight exercise, whose mandate is to provide a roadmap for the future of maritime operations in the Baltic Sea Region with a focus on shipbuilding and shipyard operations. A sister publication exists that provides a policy-innovation roadmap for Ro-Ro shipping, entitled Maritime in the 21st century.
This report is a product of inter-disciplinary collaboration. At the core of the team are the consortium members. Early drafts were validated through consultation with experts, and results were then summarised and validated together with wider industry and policy actors through surveys. For more information on the methodology, see Appendix 2.
The potential users of this roadmap include a wide variety of stakeholders. Policy makers can use it as an agenda-setting reference for promoting and championing eco-efficient policies, regulations, and standards. Industry stakeholders can use it to check against their own strategies for coherence. Researchers can use it to anticipate questions that might be of particular relevance over the next decade. Technology developers can use it to benchmark against their own expectations for technology development. In all, this roadmap can be a starting point for discussion so that all stakeholders can move together into the future, forward, by sharing the expectations for development in order to coordinate action to enact eco-efficiency in the Baltic Sea and beyond.
The report is organised as follows. The introduction will lay out the current state-of-play of eco-efficiency and the zeitgeist of the current situation on maritime that we find ourselves in, in 2020. The next section will provide some historical context looking back to 2010 and 2000 to trace the trajectory and developmental course that we are on.
The core contribution of this report is the Shipyard 4.0 Roadmap, that can be found in Figure 1 on page 9. This illustration plots the expectations for technological capabilities and policy from 2020 to 2030. The descriptions of the elements of the roadmap are provided in Appendix 1.
It should be acknowledged that the current COVID-19 pandemic has played a significant role in societies during the development of this roadmap. Indeed, the injection of such uncertainty has caused the authors of this report to reflect quite significantly. The ECOPRODIGI consortium considers this of utmost concern and thus requests that users of this roadmap take the status of the pandemic into consideration when using this roadmap. As it had always been thought of as a working roadmap of the future since its beginning, prudence is required in its use and it should be suggested that users create their own updates and assessments in an ongoing fashion as the future unfolds.