In a contract awarded by DONG Energy (DE), SeaPlanner was confirmed as the system provider for their Marine and Helicopter Coordination Centre (MHCC), acting as a centralised hub for their UK offshore wind farm construction and a number of regional Operations MHCCs.

The MHCC project utilises SeaPlanner’s latest enhancements that set out to centralise, standardise, automate and make equipment easily deployable and support far offshore projects in order to save cost and ensure safety from day one for the people working offshore.

The contract includes the provision of:

• personnel management
• vessel and helicopter tracking
• communication dispatcher and site wide communications hardware (TETRA, VHF marine, VHF airband)

This also includes the deployment of several unmanned communications containers. The containers house all equipment required, including antennae, to carry out all communications on far offshore windfarms including vessel tracking, VHF marine and airband, Tetra, helicopter tracking and crewfinder. The containers contain several self-contained safety systems including fire suppression, gas detection, climate control and more – these systems can all be monitored from the SeaPlanner software. The container is suitable for applications on guard vessels and offshore platforms.

The MHCC will include SeaPlanner hardware and software combined to fulfil the following main purposes:

• Offshore management system enabling centralised and regional support of the individual offshore sites simultaneously from standardised workstations.
• Enable voice communication between personnel offshore, vessels, helicopters and a central coordination centre across sites.
• Provide communication and sensor platforms/containers on multiple sites for central situational awareness and radio communication.
• Enable marine, helicopter and personnel coordination across all sites.
• Manage people, vessels/helicopters and personnel transfer to and from sites based on transport requests and access rights.
• Support a satellite and Tetra communication based Crew Transport Terminal on vessels and helipads for automatic people location tracking and text messaging.

[editor note – Dong Energy uses two EC135s out of Humberside Airport in the UK, flown by Danish operator UniFly]