Arising Challenges for Assuring Maritime Software Reliability in the AI Era

The maritime industry is undergoing a transition phase by embracing intelligent digitalization. Emerging AI technologies play an essential role in the wave of digitalizing maritime software systems with the aim at serving various ambitions such as improving vessel efficiency and reducing emission footprints. Due to the intricate nature of AI technologies, assuring reliability is therefore key to guarantee software system function as expected over time, which arises emerging challenges to both maritime industry and software engineering community. This short paper performed early industrial research by identifying four arising challenges of assuring maritime software in the coming AI era, posed by AI technical complexity/uncertainty, data quality and integrity, regulatory compliance and cybersecurity. By properly addressing these challenges, the maritime industry can leverage AI technologies to foster innovation while ensuring the reliability of software systems that are critical for operations.