Although younger than the maritime domain, aviation has had a huge impact on the system design and development within shipping. Stakeholders often look towards aviation to make shipping, and the way that traffic is handled and organised, safer, more efficient and more effective. Although legally not the same, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) is frequently compared to Air Traffic Control (ATC). In this article the area of traffic management within the maritime and aviation domains is addressed from a Resilience Engineering perspective. Focus is placed on the arrival part of a mission. The comparison is based on information collected during two study visits at VTS centres and one study visit at an ATC centre. The two organisations are described with the help of the Resilient Engineering capabilities: to respond, to monitor, to anticipate, and to learn. Furthermore, it is discussed how VTS and ATC adapt to cope with the complexity encountered during daily work.

Traffic management is not formally organised in the maritime domain. Ships are autonomous and find their own way. Traffic is organised through rules, regulations, and “good seamanship”; it is a distributed system. In areas of high traffic-density support is proved by vessel traffic service (VTS) to promote traffic safety and fluency. VTS does not take control. This organisational structure has proven itself in situations with sufficient resources. When resources become insufficient (e.g. not enough sailing space), the traffic needs an organising mechanism. In this article, the authors argue that the most promising way to do this is by organising centralised planning coordination, whilst leaving maritime traffic a distributed system with no additional central control.

This article presents research conducted within the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) domain. VTS is a service that is provided close to ports and geographically challenging areas to support merchant vessels in their navigation. Although VTS is legally an advice and assistance service, applying concepts from Cognitive Systems Engineering and Resilience Engineering can highlight how the joint human-machine system works to promote safe and efficient traffic movements. The VTS is a Joint Cognitive System that maintains control through a mixture of opportunistic and tactical control. Strategic control is only partially supported by the higher levels of system aggregation that provide the basis for defining daily operations within the settings of the VTS. To increase the VTS system’s ability to anticipate, respond, monitor, and learn, and therefore the ability to be resilient, there is a need to promote more strategic and tactical control within daily operations.

Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) is a service to promote traffic fluency and safety in the entrance to ports. This article׳s purpose has been to explore everyday operations of the VTS system to gain insights in how it contributes to safe and efficient traffic movements. Interviews, focus groups and an observation have been conducted to collect data about everyday operations, as well as to grasp how the VTS system adapts to changing operational conditions. The results show that work within the VTS domain is highly complex and that the two systems modelled realise their services vastly differently, which in turn affects the systems׳ ability to monitor, respond and anticipate. This is of great importance to consider whenever changes are planned and implemented within the VTS domain. Only if everyday operations are properly analysed and understood, it can be estimated how alterations to technology and organisation will affect the overall system performance.