Bob Allen, CEO at MER Equipment in Seattle, recently signed a deal with the tech company ioCurrents, also based in Seattle, to become an official reseller of ioCurrent’s MarineInsight data analysis platform.

ioCurrents president Will Roberts and chief innovation officer Cosmo King are excited about the deal and their company’s prospects moving forward. “Bob is looking to the future,” says Roberts. In the last six months, AI and machine learning have really come into its own.” He notes that over the last six or seven years, ioCurrents has been growing with the technology and constantly improving its capacity to bring new monitoring capabilities to vessel owners, helping them reduce fuel and maintenance costs.

“Our focus with MER is engine and generator efficiency,” says Roberts. “But our system is agnostic; it can take any information from any sensor on a vessel, often information that’s being brought off the vessel for the first time, and use it to optimize operations. The biggest part is looking at fuel use in the engines and generators.” Roberts notes that while chief engineers and captains may have a sense of their engine’s sweet spot in terms of load and efficiency, the MarineInsight system takes the guesswork and identifies that spot and more. 

“The system also looks at degradation of engines in real time and brings predictability to maintenance. It can give you hours or days of warning about a problem. “We had a case where a trawler engine went out of spec and might have been shut down, but we were able to identify when it would actually fail, and they were able to keep running another week and finish their season.”