xyzt.ai Wins Maritime Innovation Challenge by INEOS & Port of Antwerp
Location intelligence company xyzt.ai presented an innovative collision avoidance system in partnership with Securitas and Bolesian for early detection and warning of possible dangerous situations at the INEOS jetty in Port of Antwerp.
Leuven, Belgium, 08 April 2022 – xyzt.ai, a Leuven-based high-tech company offering an innovative visual analytics SaaS (Software as a Service) platform for big location data, announces today it has won the Innovation Challenge organized by the multinational chemical company INEOS and leading port authority Port of Antwerp. The proposed safety system named “Officer on Watch” detects if ships are on a collision course with the INEOS jetty or other ships.
INEOS Phenol Belgium operates a jetty in the river Scheldt close to the Deurganckdok in Port of Antwerp, which is used to transport feed- and end-products mainly by water. However, the river follows a curved trajectory and can become quite crowded with large and smaller vessels. This complicates the navigation of each vessel and increases the possibility of a collision. A recent near incident at the INEOS jetty propelled the company to come up with an innovative solution.
An innovative solution for collision avoidance
The “Officer on Watch” solution provides early detection of possible dangerous situations and alerts the staff to take the necessary safety measures in time. Rodrigue Bijlsma, VTS traffic controller at Port of Antwerp, initiated the idea and mentions that due to the complexity of the challenge, the solution required multiple companies to work together and combine their expertise to achieve the most effective system.
“We were looking for something that did not yet exist. That is why we initiated the innovation challenge together with Port of Antwerp.”
Benny Van Den Heuvel, Smart Manufacturing Excellence Manager at INEOS Phenol Belgium.
xyzt.ai complements the expertise of security service provider Securitas and artificial intelligence company Bolesian by providing the capability to leverage AIS data and extract knowledge from the movement of ships to identify when a vessel might diverge from its normal trajectory and potentially cause a dangerous and costly situation.
The challenge required the collision avoidance system to have a high reliability rate, provide a fast response time, and have a cost-effective implementation. The Officer on Watch system acts on a basis of three information sources:
- AIS data sourced from radar revealing the movements of ships
- The detection of stress levels via voice communication sourced from VHF channels
- The detection of the whistle and horn of vessels sourced from microphones.
The system combines hard or factual data, such as AIS data, with soft data sources, such as the recognition of stress levels in voice communication and specific nautical words, to accurately detect an evolving dangerous situation in its early stages.
“With Officer on Watch, our analytics software is going to detect anomalies in real-time, allowing us to proactively respond to potential dangers.”
Bart Adams, CTO & Founder of xyzt.ai.
Since 2000 there were four incidents with the INEOS jetty in the Scheldt river with some leading to considerable damage causing the jetty to be out of service for a long time.
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For press inquiries, please contact:
xyzt.ai
Lida Joly
Founder & CEO
About xyzt.ai
xyzt.ai is a high-tech SaaS company that brings its users actionable business insights through a cloud-based SaaS platform for visualizing and analyzing big location data of any vehicle, vessel, aircraft, person, or asset being tracked.
It does so in a unique and effortless way: Customer setup takes less than a day, there is no custom development needed, and insights can be obtained in an interactive way, even for billions of location records.
xyzt.ai is supported by Plug and Play Tech Center, one of the largest accelerators in the world with headquarters in Silicon Valley, by Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship and Flanders Investment and Trade.
xyzt.ai is named as an IDC Innovator for offering groundbreaking location and geospatial intelligence solutions and is part of the Global Top 100 Geospatial Companies selected by Geoawesomeness.
More information is available at www.xyzt.ai