On February 4, the Ocean Join Integrated Ship Information System (OJIS) independently developed by Marine Operations of Xiamen University (MarOps) was granted the Certificate of Type Approval for the Management System (Software) of PMS (Planned Maintenance System) issued by China Classification Society (CCS). It is the first ship information system applied by a university in China for CCS’s type approval. The Certificate marks a breakthrough in the information technology application and ship operations made by MarOps, further enhancing the commercial value and core competitiveness of the OJIS.
Photo: The homepage of the OJIS
A planned maintenance system on ships (PMS) allows shipowners and operators to plan, perform and document vessel maintenance at set intervals complying with CCS and manufacturer requirements.
Traditionally, the ship maintenance plan is dismantled manually offline every month, with written worksheets and information flowing from ship to shore for regular inspections and records. However, the previous maintenance plan features cumbersome approval processes, a lack of supervision in the maintenance, and high ship operation and management costs. Problems such as backlog or shortage of spare parts in stock, incoherent maintenance items, and incomplete data can inevitably occur.
Given the regulations of CCS, the OJIS supports streamlining the planning, distribution, implementation, and acceptance of maintenance and surveys onboard. Furthermore, the system consists of “three terminals” referring to the ship, shipowner, and ship management company, and “four modules” which are workflow module, communication module, report module, and mail module, enabling ship management, overall and real-time supervision of equipment maintenance, automatic update of stock counts in consideration of spare parts and equipment maintenance data, efficient resource allocation and information tracking, effective communication and sharing of ship maintenance data between ship and shore.
It is worth mentioning that the traditional PMS is mainly targeted at merchant ships. But the OJIS was initially developed to include the management and operation requirements of different ships in the list of software application scenarios.
To make the OJIS adapt to various ships such as scientific research vessels, the development team of MarOps worked closely with Xiamen International Trade Shipping Co. Ltd., the ship management company of RV TKK, and finally integrated the system with the management modules of the ship, the shipowner, and the ship management company, allowing ship operators to easily use the system without secondary development.
To date, the OJIS has been deployed and put into use on over ten research vessels and merchant ships. In the future, MarOps will continue to cooperate with Xiamen International Trade Shipping Co. Ltd. and other shipping companies to promote the deployment of the OJIS, and the digital and intelligent transformation among shipping companies.
