The Data Pipeline From Deck to Bridge
A walk-through of every hop the data takes — sensor cell, segment master, vessel server, bridge console — and the latency budget at each.
The bridge console must change state within seconds of the deck event, and the latency budget is fixed: from sensor measurement to red-state on the console, under 4 seconds with 99.9% confidence. Here is how we spend that.
Latency budget
Why the 3-second confirmation
A red state on the bridge has to be trustworthy. We trade 3 seconds of additional latency for cross-cell coherence — confirming the anomaly is local to one vehicle, not a sensor glitch and not an environmental spike.
What gets retained
Every sensor reading is retained at 1 Hz for the full voyage on the vessel server, and downsampled to 1 / minute on shore upload. Anomaly windows are retained at full resolution (10 Hz) for 90 days.
How RoRoSAFE helps
This is the path a RoRoSAFE alert takes: from the cell under the vehicle, through failure-isolated segments on a deterministic, redundant fieldbus, to the bridge console and shore dashboard in near real time. For an operator, the result is an alert that reaches the bridge fast enough to act on and survives a single failure on the way.
Pilot: one deck · installed alongside the berth · no drydock · 6 months of dashboard access
Questions, answered
What is the latency budget from deck sensor to bridge console?+
Fixed at under 4 seconds from sensor measurement to a console red-state with 99.9% confidence. It breaks down roughly as 8 ms sensor-to-segment-master (EtherCAT poll), 120 ms to the vessel server for anomaly evaluation, 350 ms to the bridge console over websocket, plus a ~3-second confirmation window.
Why spend 3 seconds on confirmation before showing red?+
Because a red state on the bridge has to be trustworthy. The system trades 3 seconds of latency for cross-cell coherence — confirming the anomaly is local to one vehicle, not a sensor glitch and not an environmental spike — so crews can trust that red means red.
What sensor data is retained, and for how long?+
Every sensor reading is retained at 1 Hz for the full voyage on the vessel server and downsampled to one sample per minute on shore upload. Anomaly windows are retained at full 10 Hz resolution for 90 days, supporting forensic review and class evidence.
Continue the thread
Multi-Modal Fusion: Heat, Gas, and Smoke
Each sensor modality has different blind spots. Multi-modal fusion is not a buzzword — it is the only architecture that survives the marine failure modes.
FIRESAFE II: Open-Deck Detection Lessons
EMSA's 2018 study full-scale tested two detection technologies, not five, and named ventilation as what both delays and displaces an alarm.
Time Synchronisation Without GPS Belowdecks
A red-state event has to be timestamped to within milliseconds across all sensor cells. Belowdecks, GPS is not available. PTP over the EtherCAT ring is.