MARSEC-XL, a not-for-profit foundation established in Malta three years ago to shape the digital future of the marine industry through ICT, announced the first open source, community-driven platform project in the marine industry.
The foundation said that after more than three years of baseline research and experimentation the foundation for the Marine Systems Software Architecture (MARSSA) has been laid and the platform is open for collaboration, contributions and use.
MARSSA will serve as the base for integration, compatibility and interoperability of electronic systems in the marine industry. As a result of this project, the marine domain will become an opportunity-driven and innovative industry with enhanced competitiveness. Customers and users will enjoy very high quality, reliable products and systems with seamless interoperability and a low threshold for introduction of the latest technologies. At the same time the total cost of ownership will be radically reduced.
“After three years of development of the MARSSA architecture, we were really surprised ourselves with the cost savings and, at the same time, what this totally novel approach to high-tech in the marine industry can achieve,” explained Zak Borg, research engineer and MARSSA project manager.
“In the current prototype projects we see that the development cost will be less than 20 percent of conventional project costs. Open source, high quality and community drive is definitely the way to go for this industry and we invite you to join and lead the way, free your mind and let’s start the innovation revolution together.”
Clayton Tabone, research engineer and open source Linux developer working on the project development explained: “Based on the MARSSA platform and using the MARSEC-XL Quality Software Development Process, we managed to do this in a few weeks, and the system has been stable and up and running all the time. We didn’t even have to restart the system one single time during the entire development phase, it is truly remarkable.”
To validate the MARSSA architecture MARSEC-XL is currently running a number of prototype projects for various onboard systems. The initial areas tackled include power management for hybrid vessels, intelligent docking assistance, automatic electronic logbooks and a sailing assistant with heads-up display.
Frontend user interface can easily be implemented on state of the art devices like the iPad, Android devices or HD displays. Virtually any system that opens up to interface with MARSSA can co-exist and interoperate in the onboard private cloud and, given the new distributed and high quality computing backbone, the overall system quality, availability and low cost will be revolutionary in the marine industry, the foundation said.
MARSEC-XL has invited all interested individuals as well as organisations from the marine industry and beyond to join in this exciting project.
www.marsec-xl.org