The seafaring and fishing industries in Indonesia have been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. There is an urgent need to research the best technical solutions to ensure the safety of seafarers and fishers so that they can keep working safely at sea. It is highly unlikely that the Indonesian fleet will be able to rapidly return to the pre-COVID-19 situation within the next few years. Therefore, long-term solutions are required. This research aims to provide guidance for owners, operators and masters to reconfigure their vessels and operations to ensure a safe working environment to counter the potential spread of the virus, as well as maintaining the integral safety of the vessels. The present paper reports several primary activities, including analysis of existing guidelines, questionnaire survey, computational fluid dynamics, remote monitoring and machine learning. These works are expected to provide indications on virus-hazardous areas for ships, inform guidelines on hygienic and reconfiguring means to counter COVID-19 and potentially the spread of similar viruses, and further establish a long-term monitoring and optimising system for ship safety and performance.

Indonesia is one of the top three countries in the world for fisher fatalities due to a lack of stability monitoring, poor vessel design, and the fishers’ poor safety culture. Improved safety through technology, in particular stability awareness, has been identified as a key aspect to prevent capsizing and sinking. Despite the low technology uptake by Indonesian fishers, they are known to make extensive use of smart mobile phones as a primary form of communication. These phones are equipped with various sensors, including motion sensors that can be used by different mobile applications. This paper proposes the use of a mobile application to aid Indonesian fishers in assessing the stability of their vessel by using results from a roll decay test or realtime roll motion data monitored when operating at sea. For the pre-departure test, the mobile application uses the onboard gyroscope to record the roll angle time series which can then be used to quantify the roll period. An offline calculation is then carried out to approximate the vessel’s metacentric height. This is then visually presented using a traffic light system to provide the fishermen with a simple indication of whether the vessel is stable or not. Should the boat be unstable, additional guidance is provided to improve the vessel’s stability. The realtime monitoring system alerts the fishers when the thresholds are exceeded, to ensure realtime awareness of increased risk to the stability of the vessel.