A REVIEW OF THE USE OF ECDIS FOR THE SAFETY OF NAVIGATION

The use of electronic equipment for navigation is widely considered both necessary and useful. The introduction of electronic charts and ECDIS equipment has substantially reduced the officers’ workload previously burdened by paper chart navigation. The amount of time previously spent for handling and correcting the paper charts during navigational watch gives the dimension of the effort required by the traditional paper navigation.

The valuable time saved by the paperless navigation offers the deck officer the possibility to properly lookout, evaluate and assess the situation before making decisions. The advanced technologies offer multiple benefits, through sophisticated functions, used during navigation to greater or lesser extent. These functions are generally regarded as providing assistance for the safety of navigation and therefore their understanding is paramount. Several casualties related to ECDIS navigation have proved that the deck officers over-rely on the electronic equipment. In many cases, these officers failed to analyse and synthetize the information provided by the electronic equipment. This paper aims at advancing factual information relating to ECDIS navigational incidents and analysing their occurrence with regard to ECDIS implementation timetable. The main result of this review is the understanding of human resistance to change, in spite of common openness to using new technologies.