ISL presents Project RAIN at the AISS 24

On September 10, ISL employee Patrick Specht presented the methodological approach of the RAIN project for discussion in his paper "Envisioning the future of autonomous shipping: Introducing consistency-based scenario modeling for strategic foresight" at this year's Autonomous Inland and Short Sea Shipping Conference (AISS2024) in Duisburg. The AISS is a scientific conference that has been held annually since 2019 and is dedicated to the automation of short sea and inland shipping and aims to support international exchange between industry, science and authorities. 

"The developments of autonomous shipping are characterized by a high degree of complexity, a difficult to predict development of technology and costs, regulatory uncertainties and systemic dependencies. As long-term forecasts about the future of autonomous inland navigation are therefore associated with enormous uncertainty, we advocate a scenario-oriented approach in which we do not focus on the development of a single vision of the future, but rather span the possible corridor of future systemic developments," says Specht, summarizing his presentation. 

ISL is working together with the Development Center for Ship Technology and Transport Systems (DST) and the Federal Association of Public Inland Ports (BÖB) as part of its "RAIN" project to determine what this could look like using the specific example of inland ports by the end of 2025. The project is being funded by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport Affairs (BMDV) as part of the IHATEC funding guideline.