Dr Alexandros Ntovas speaks at the Autonomous Ships Conference 2024, Copenhagen

The rapid technological development in the field of maritime autonomy is creating an opportunity for the marine industry as well as a challenge for the regulatory framework.

In recent years, various ships projects involving coastal and ocean-going routes with different degrees of autonomy are being tested. Those will have great implications for naval architects, shipbuilders, shipping companies, and maritime systems providers. In December 2024, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) will host 109th session of the Maritime Safety Committee (MSC) where the Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) group will meet again. The Royal Institution of Naval Architects and the Danish Society of Engineers convened in Copenhagen, Denmark, the 3rd Autonomous ship conference on 20-22 November 2024 ahead of the IMO meeting. The conference was opened by Malene Axelsen Mundt, Director of Maritime Regulation and Legal Affairs at the Danish Maritime Authority (DMA).

Dr Ntovas sat at the panel of ‘Regulation’, which was moderated by Erik Ingolf Tvedt (DMA), and in his intervention, he reflected on the substance of the recent decisions in Legal Committee (111th session, 22-26 April 2024) and Maritime Safety Committee (108th session, 15-24 May 2024) to revise the IMO MASS Road Map the aim is to offer the MASS Code on a voluntary basis in 2025, with its final version to be adopted as a mandatory instrument by 2030 with proposed entry into force on 1 January 2032. While the MASS Code shall be expected to address sufficiently some of the essential changes in terms of making and applying future legislation that should not be inconsistent with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 (UNCLOS), the ostensibly simple question is whether autonomous (a concept that is yet to be conclusively defined) ships will meet the legal requirement of ‘hu-manning’, a term that he proposed to be used for combining in this context the existing manning requirement accruing from UNCLOS within the immediate prospect of technological advancements rendering the ship – ie., as a system combining processes and equipment – to perform data acquisition, analysis, decision making and action implementation, etc., without human assistance; but not precluding in the future and under certain conditions, all these to become also independent of human control.