Singapore Builds the Command Centre — and Opens a Line the Crew Can Use Anonymously

The Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore announced three things at once this week, and the smallest of them is the one this publication has been asking for since July. First, the infrastructure. MPA has operationalised IPOC — Integrated Port Operations Command, Control and Communications — developed with the Defence Science and Technology Agency and ST Engineering. It aggregates live data from multiple sources to give MPA officers a real-time view of port operations, with map-based tools for coordination and risk identification. Second, the autonomy programme. MPA signed a memorandum of understanding with Ocean Infinity to test autonomous and remote marine operations in Singapore's port waters. Ocean Infinity brings operational expertise; MPA supports trial design and safety assessment, and will evaluate requirements for future autonomous vessel deployment, including Remote Operations Centres. Third — and this is the one. The National Maritime Safety at Sea Council and the Singapore Shipping Association have launched the Singapore Near Miss Reporting System, a confidential platform modelled on CHIRP, accepting anonymised submissions from seafarers and other sea space users so that safety lessons can be shared widely. Why the small one matters most. In July we asked, and have carried on this radar since, whether anybody would ever collect independent evidence about how technology is changing the working reality on board — as opposed to asking the companies that bought it. The answer has always run into the same wall: seafarers who report through their employer report what is safe to report. An anonymous channel is not a nice-to-have adjacent to that problem; it is the only known solution to it. CHIRP has been generating usable aviation and maritime safety intelligence on exactly this principle for decades. Why this matters for ship managers: if this system works, Singapore will accumulate a body of near-miss data that no individual operator can generate alone, covering alarm fatigue, automation confusion, workload and handover — the failure modes that precede casualties and almost never appear in an incident report. That data will eventually inform port rules, and later, insurance. What to do now: tell your crews the channel exists, and tell them in a way that makes clear you are not going to look for their submissions. Then, separately, ask yourself whether your own internal near-miss reporting is anonymous — and if it is not, what you think that does to the numbers you review every month. The honest caveat: no funding figures, timelines, sample targets or publication commitments were announced for any of the three initiatives. A near-miss system is only as good as its submission volume and its willingness to publish uncomfortable findings, and neither is yet demonstrated. IPOC is a port authority capability, not something a commercial operator can buy or access. And the Ocean Infinity agreement is an MoU covering trials, with no vessel, timeline or scope disclosed. [Smart Maritime Network]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 23 August 2026.

More on: Autonomous ships · Crew and new systems