Welcome to the final deliverable of the ARPA project, a collaborative effort between Turku University of Applied Sciences and Novia University of Applied Sciences from 2020 to 2023. ARPA acronym stands for Applied Research Platform for Autonomous Systems. Due to their importance for South-West Finland, we focused on the digitalization of marine industry and shipping.

Funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture with a two-million-euro grant for the period of 1.10.2020-31.12.2023, the ARPA project is part of the RDI profiling initiative. This initiative strategically positions both universities to focus on autonomous systems in the future.

The journey towards fully autonomous logistics involves significant steps such as remote operations and partly automated vessels. However, this journey is long and heavily dependent on the evolution of regulatory processes.

The ARPA project was structured around three focus areas: physical environments, virtual environments, and a Data Platform that bridges these domains. Our results, which are available in this publication and ARPA blog https://arpa-project.turkuamk.fi/blog/, demonstrate the synergy between these areas.

Physical research platforms are a test vessel, a Remote Operation Center (ROC), and industrial environment. Metaverse, digital twins and simulations create meaningful digital prototyping and testing environments complementing physical RDI environments. The data platform is the central hub for all the data collected in physical test environments and produced within digital twins and simulations. The platform will be utilized in distributing open data sets.

(pdf-tiedosto, 5.022 Mt)

The publication can be downloaded for free. This copyrighted material can be downloaded and printed for private use. Commercial use prohibited.