Building communication interface in ship area network for merchant marine: A practical approach

Ship area network is a convergence network which provides unified interface to local control networks in a merchant marine while enabling remote maintenance services. It presents the next generation model of ship network. However, most machinery suppliers are reluctant to adopt the ship area network, regarding it as still an early stage of development. In this paper, we describe a practical approach to install the ship area network by building communication interfaces to ship automation system as a gateway system. This approach can be adopted as an intermediate step from the traditional network model to the next ship area network model.