Reliability Currently most crews on board commercial cargo ships primarily consist of navigational officers and engine crews who maintain the ship's propulsion machinery, auxiliary machinery, generators for procuring electricity, separators, pumps, cooling system. These systems are often quite complex and require regular maintenance. Increasing redundancy is seen as the solution, either by having two engine systems or by using different propulsion methods that contain fewer moving parts such as electricity on . yet some argue that work is going too slow as advances are being made and autonomous ships already being prepared to be launched. As of 2021, Maritime Safety Committee, Legal Committee, Facilitation Committee, and Marine Environment Protection Committee of the International Maritime Organization conducted Regulatory Scoping Exercise for the use of MASS. There are states which already developed and implemented their national regulation on MASS. Among them, the Russian Federation adopted Government Decree No 2031, “On Carrying Out the Trials of Autonomous Ships Flying the State Flag of the Russian Federation”, “Guidelines on COLREG application on MASS”, and developed Federal Law on legal relationship arising from the use of autonomous ships.
Cyber security Cyber attacks have become an increased threat in maritime shipping, where hackers have managed to compromise systems such as AIS, using cheap jammers to spoof
GPS signals and hacking into the servers of container terminals in order to get shipping manifests. The maritime industry has been criticized for not being able to keep up with technological innovation, lagging 10–20 years behind other industries and leaving computer networks insecure and open for intrusion by
organized crime and state actors. Due to the increased reliance on information and communications technology in semi- and fully autonomous ships,
cyber security becomes an even more serious issue that companies would need to address. On board ship controls and data might be compromised and vulnerable to cyber attacks as the autonomous ships require a constant connection to allow monitoring and control. The complexity of a ship design with various components from different providers can make it hard to detect and stop cyber attacks from occurring. If an autonomous ship would come under cyber attack, regaining control of the ship can become difficult because the lack of on-board crew that can take control manually. Specific systems and risk assessments for autonomous ships are proposed order to address this problem. Another problem is that due to increased data transmission needed to be sent back and forth between ships and onshore command centers, it increases the chances of "data swamping," where vast amounts of raw data will be produced and transmitted. To achieve more efficient use of storage and communication capacity, smart pre-processing and compression schemes are needed in order to reduce the chances of "data swamping." the transition phase will require human operation and intervention. At the moment, there is insufficient training for human operations involved in degrees one, two, and three of maritime autonomous surface ships, creating an insecure operational environment. The IMO’s principal regulatory convention includes an instrument titled “The International Convention on Standard of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers of 1978” that outlines the minimum standards of competence required for human operators. The STCW Code was last amended in 2018, Positions such as unmanned vessel operators, autonomous ship supervisors, and watch officers are in high demand, however, the problem of nonstandardized training procedures must be resolved to be able to ensure that these individuals have a deep understanding of all of the capabilities, as well as limitations, of the autonomous and non-autonomous systems. However, as cyber incidents increase in volume, their management has the potential to affect the fitness of manned and autonomous ships. == See also ==