Costa Concordia: Human in the control loop
Well we don’t know the cause of the Costa Concordia’s sinking yet, but there is some strong news stories, for instance the Belfast Telegraph quoted the owners of the ship stating that the captain made “ ‘an unapproved, unauthorised’ deviation to his route”, https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/captain-blamed-for-costa-concordia-cruise-disaster-16104130.html
Let’s not focus on the human right now, but what happened to alarms, back-up decision making, etc.? How much do you put into your software design? From the Challenger (Space Shuttle) explosion, to Capt. Sculley (Airbus in the Hudson, a success), how do you design to lessen the impact of terminal decision making?
Write the specs for a Cruise Ship Control System. Just think about the high level software you would need, controllers, etc.
- Navigation control (which appears to be the high level problem here)
- Ship stability (don’t want the cruise ship passengers getting sick)
- Engine control
- Fuel Management
- Environmental controls
- Purser (Inventory, passenger tracking, maintenance, gangway control, etc.)
- Human resource management (worker management)
- Communications
So one item fails out of the 8 of these items, somehow the navigation control got a bad command or similar. After all, those waters have been traveled quite a bit for a number of centuries.
Ship engineering reference:
Now, is there a market for software and maintenance of that software? Sure.
- https://nauticalsoftwaresolution.com/
- https://www.fideliocruise.com/
- https://www.cruiseshipmanagement.com/
- https://www.intergraph.com/learnmore/ppm/shipbuilding/ship-design.aspx
Games:
- Cruise Ship Tycoon (Badly Reviewed)
Just think, you could save lives by improving software for the cruise industry!