Many wind farm at the North Sea are located close to a heavily trafficked shipping routes for vessels heading towards the ports in the Le Havre – Hamburg range. IMO regulations prohibit sailing directly through a wind farm, including the 500-meter buffer zone surrounding it.
Due to the busy maritime traffic and the increased vulnerability of workers, foundations, cables, and equipment during the construction phase, windfarm construction companies choose to secure the wind farm using the Remote Vessel Traffic Monitoring services. Remote VTM is essentially a traffic management system and can be used both as primary VTM of secondary back-up.
On a large screen, all shipping traffic is visible around the wind farm 24/7. Ships are displayed as a triangle with a name and a vector. The length of the vector indicates where the ship will be after half an hour of sailing. Therefore, the faster the ship, the longer the vector.
If the vector crosses the boundaries of the prohibited area, the system triggers an alarm, and the ship’s captain is immediately instructed to change course.
An additional feature of this program is monitoring the position of workers. The system knows how many workers are dropped off at a wind turbine and how many people are on the workboats. In the event of approaching bad weather, the system can quickly determine if there are still workers at a wind turbine.
Core tasks
- 24/7 monitoring of all vessels passing by your offshore assets;
- Contact the vessel on collision course and advise to change course and keep a safe distance
- Keep monitoring if vessel stays on a safe course
- Escalate if the potential dangerous situation remains
- Assist the OIM with an incident report in the case of an actual violation of the safety zones
Maritime Control Room
From our control room in Maassluis we monitor the shipping traffic in the vicinity of these objects 24/7 by using AIS and Radar. Vessels that are about to create a potentially harmful situation are contacted via VHF to change their dangerous course. Depending on the established procedures, both the platform operator and authorities are informed.
Why Royal Dirkzwager?
- Royal Dirkzwager has a longstanding experience in the world of maritime safety.
- We offer a wide range of solutions, from low cost AIS-only based to fully redundant AIS / radar / CCTV / VHF communication solutions.
- Our technology partnership with Vissim
- ROAM can be enhanced with options such as early detection of oil spills
