Reduced Manning to Increase Fleet Competitiveness

The merchant fleets of many countries worldwide have experienced a significant decline of competitiveness over the years. Phenomena such as national fleet shrinkage and "flagging out" have been the main manifestations of such a decline. Realizing that manning costs are frequently a major percentage of ship operating costs, one of the measures that has been contemplated in order to reverse this trend has been the design, development, and operation of highly automated ships manned by reduced crews. The purpose of this paper is to present the results of an analysis that addresses the question to what extent and under which scenarios can advanced technologies that reduce manning improve merchant fleet competitiveness. The analysis is the product of a European Commission project, and, as such, focuses on the fleets of European Union member states. However, we also attempt to generalize the conclusions to other fleets of the world.