Voyage Planning and Track Keeping with Paper and Electronic Charts: A Case Study of Maritime Navigation Tasks

Abstract

Enhancements in shipboard automation offer the prospect of crew size reductions for navigation tasks. This work was concerned with comparing the structure of navigation tasks using paper charts with the same tasks accomplished using an electronic chart display information system (ECDIS). Voyage planning with paper charts is based on drawing specific voyage segments, measuring distances between waypoints, and annotating the chart with voyage specific information. These tasks change substantially with electronic charts, particularly in terms of how the task is accomplished. Similarly, the manual activities of track keeping are reduced, but the need for a continuous record maintains the use of the paper chart. For both navigation tasks, there is less ability to visualize geographic features continuously with electronic charts because of the keyhole effect created by a CRT display. It is concluded that the design of automated navigation aids should be based not only on the informational aspects of task performance, but also the functional means by which navigators carry out their tasks with conventional technologies such as paper charts.