Working with alarms on ships ICT work on ships

Alarm indicators are a very simple and important user interface for many control tasks, and are known to be problematic. Alarms on ships have increased in number and importance. Recent incidents such as Savannah Express, Aquitaine and others have identified a number of important issues in the way that alarm systems support safe and effective work. The state of alarm systems onboard is inconsistent across systems, which also raises a number of issues. A change in philosophy to ‘alerts’ has been proposed recently to enable better prioritisation of messages to users. An ideal implementation of alerts to support current technology and organisation could be envisaged. However, it is likely that only a very few implementations approaching this ideal will be built in the near future. In the longer term, both the technology and the organisation will have changed again, and the role and implementation of alerts may need further examination to support future operations. The prospects of better support to onboard team working, and distributed team working need to be considered, together with the use of new paradigms such as ambient interfaces. This paper briefly describes the current state of alarm systems, new developments and future prospects in terms of alarms as an important aid to onboard working.