TOKYO-Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Ltd. (MOL; President & CEO: Jotaro Tamura; Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo) and IBM Japan, Ltd. (General Manager and President: Akio Yamaguchi; Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo) today announced the joint development of an AI powered platform that integrates a wide range of information related to vessel operations to enhance decision making. Centered on MOL's Safety Operation Supporting Center (SOSC); (Note 1), which supports the safe operation of MOL-affiliated vessels around the world, the platform centrally manages information-such as weather and sea conditions, navigation status, and geopolitical developments-that was previously dispersed across multiple sources. By rapidly identifying critical information for vessels, the platform that not only speeds up decision making but also increases the quality of operational decisions.
In recent years, the environment surrounding vessel operations has become increasingly complex due to rapid changes in weather and sea conditions, as well as the growing influence of geopolitical factors. Under these circumstances, MOL's SOSC has faced the challenge of balancing both the quality and speed of decision-making-by extracting critical events from a vast and dispersed volume of information, synthesizing multiple factors, and simultaneously making important judgments.
This platform, which has gone live on July 1, was developed by integrating SOSC's accumulated expertise in vessel operations, the AI technologies of MOL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INDIA PVT. LTD. (MOLIT),and IBM Japan's expertise in AI and data utilization. The development leveraged the IBM Garage (Note 2) methodology, which enables an end-to-end approach-from proposing system designs tailored to customer needs through development and implementation. (....)