Towards integrated operations for ships

Maritime customers will benefit greatly from integrated operations between ship and shore. It requires integrating diverse information services within a variety of communication environments, which is a complex task. The common approach to dealing with complex tasks is to use a divide-and-conquer policy and solve problems independently. Since there are mainly two challenges involved - interoperability among heterogeneous applications and connectivity through difficult maritime networks, to handle them separately has become useful. While interoperability and connectivity solutions work well individually, if we put them together in the maritime context, problems arise. We b services based interoperability solution assumes continuous connectivity to the network, which is usually not available in the maritime environment. Though adapting applications to such network conditions will help, existing implementations are mostly specialized and non-generic. Therefore, negotiation between separate solutions is needed: 1) applications must adapt to different connectivity situations but in a service-oriented manner; 2) networks need to mediate the adaptiveness and follow the service-oriented trend. As a concrete example, we suggest to implement the negotiation via incremental deployment from wrapping existing mediation capabilities as We b services towards a possibly service-oriented network architecture, where mediation mechanisms and communication resources are standard services invoked directly by applications.