Mark Casey

Mark Casey heads up the UK Hydrographic Office's Research and Innovation function. Mark has over 30 years' experience of utilising geospatial data to produce navigation products and services in both the Air and Maritime domains. Initially 22 years spent in the Royal Air Force making aeronautical maps charts and has spent the last 10 years at the UK Hydrographic Office leading the Research and Innovation team in exploring new technologies and tools to create new navigation Proof of Concepts for UK Defence and the commercial maritime markets. He is also chair of the International Hydrographic Organisation’s MASS Navigation Project Team which is defining the future navigation data and standards that will be required to navigate large autonomous ships.

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Presentation

The Universal Hydrographic Data Model: A key enabler for degree four MASS

The next generation Universal Hydrographic Data Model (UHDM S-100) is inherently more flexible than the current S-57 IHO standard for digital hydrographic data. S57 has been in use since 1992 and was last updated in 2000. S-100 offers provision for richer, granular gridded data and imagery, time varying and machine-readable data, enhanced metadata, and multiple coding formats, all essential for MASS. In November 2022, the International Hydrographic Office published its Roadmap for S-100 Implementation - a study led by the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office (UKHO) and constitutes a transition plan aimed at the regular and harmonized production and dissemination of S-100 based products. In this presentation, Phil Thompson (BMT) & Mark Casey (UKHO) explain why current navigation products are not fit for purpose and how next generation S—100 navigation standards can provide the level of data to achieve a step change in situational awareness needed to support Degree four MASS. They will outline how S-100 navigation data has already been integrated and tested onboard the AI and machine learning software stack of a MASS. The authors then demonstrate how S-100 data for bathymetry, dynamic water heights and surface currents is already supporting precision e-navigation, demonstrating the data integrity needed to support fully autonomous ships of the future.