Ministry of Transport and Communications of Finland has the pleasure to invite you to the workshop, taking place in The Hotel.BRUSSELS on 17^th of February.

Technological development enables advanced automation, including safe navigation and optimisation of a cost-effective route – solutions enabling carbon-free transport are also evolving. Solutions are not economically viable yet. Expensive merchant ships have a long lifecycle and ensuring the reliability of automation systems increases costs. Business case and general approval is still missing and legislation lacks behind. There is an increasing need for data sharing to provide a more level playing field for all actors to enable new innovations and new services without compromising business secrets.

In order to move forward, it is essential that, in maritime transport automation and logistics ecosystems are enabled where different stakeholders – companies, public sector and research – come together in order to find efficient and sustainable solutions to accomplish goals of human-centricity, safety and security, efficiency and sustainability. Ecosystems enable trust building, which is a key precondition for data sharing and general approval of technologies.

The session concerns how to enable adoption of new technologies and automation including Artificial Intelligence in a competitive way without compromising human-centricity, safety and security and environmental sustainability. The programme will focus among other things on how to foster trials, testbeds and innovation projects and how to bring these innovations to the market. One important aspect of the debate is that all political measures should comply with principle of proportionality to attract new databased business, adoption of new algorithms and technologies as well as full-scale pilots. Moreover, we take a look how regulators and industry should raise the level of ambition by working hand in hand to turn the forthcoming challenges into opportunities.

Come to keep up to date with the latest developments in the field and define the crucial aspects of finding new business cases and opportunities of maritime digitalisation and automation.