Case study · Hoppe Marine

AI platform for a maritime expert in control and automation technology

Heavy-lift ships with a crane in the harbour

Facts & figures

> 12 million

words of industrial knowledge processed so far

> 70

subsystems & components systematically assessed per analysis

Numerous

document pages analysed per major project

Less

time spent on documentation and data maintenance for upcoming complex analyses

The challenge: bringing standards knowledge and engineering know-how together in complex analyses

In the maritime industry, system analyses for safety-critical systems are a regulatory requirement and technically extremely demanding. A complete Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) according to IEC 60812 requires a deep technical understanding of your own systems and a confident command of the normative requirements. The underlying standards and classification guidelines alone run to more than 500 pages.

The challenge is not a lack of will but a lack of access: standards, internal system documentation, electrical diagrams, component specifications and experience from past projects are spread across many documents and systems. Anyone carrying out a complete system analysis spends much of their time not on the actual engineering judgement but on searching, cross-referencing and gathering the basics.

Every project is unique and often consists of more than 5,000 parts and over 500 components. The technical and commercial analysis is correspondingly complex, and it requires expertise throughout the entire process: from the quote in sales, through supporting product management, to project engineering and service.

The solution: MAIA as the central access point to knowledge for system analyses

Hoppe Marine uses MAIA as a knowledge platform that supports engineering in producing system analyses that comply with the standards. The approach combines standards knowledge, internal engineering know-how and project-specific data in a single, fully accessible knowledge system whose answers can be validated:

Regulatory foundations are stored in MAIA and available straight away, with no more manual searching through 500-page standards.
Templates from Hoppe’s own FMECA tables and standards committees serve as a structural model that MAIA takes into account directly.
Engineering knowledge such as technical system documentation, electrical diagrams and component specifications is added per project and can be searched immediately.
Persona prompting puts MAIA in the role of an expert assistant with a clear glossary and normative context, so the answers stay consistently at the right technical level.

Knowledge sources at a glance: IEC 60812, the FMECA template, system documentation and electrical diagrams flow into MAIA. The result is a standard-compliant system analysis, verified by the responsible system managers.

This lets engineering focus on engineering judgement rather than on gathering the basics. Verifying and validating all analysis results naturally remains with the responsible system managers.

The result: more time for engineering judgement, with the same normative quality

With MAIA, most of the working time shifts from gathering information to the actual value creation: the expert judgement, verification and derivation of technical measures by the specialists at Hoppe Marine. Decisions are still made by people. MAIA takes over the research, not the judgement. That suits a working day in which being available and responding quickly to customers remain important. And it shows where the real benefit lies: in the interplay between MAIA and the team’s experience.

Faster, more reliable quotation decisions

During a quotation phase, MAIA provides all the relevant standards and experience within a short time. Sales and project management can assess technical risks soundly, even for system concepts being built for the first time, and quantify the commercial consequences reliably.

Knowledge transfer within the company

The projects, templates and technical documents stored in MAIA are used beyond the knowledge management team, for example to structure internal e-learning courses across three knowledge levels (Basic / Advanced / Expert).

Primary use cases

Support with system analyses (FMECA) for ongoing projects

MAIA provides engineering with structured access to:

Normative requirements
Experience from past projects
Internal system documentation on sensors, pumps and control components
Wiring and circuit diagrams as searchable PDF sources
Project-specific templates for the output format

Simplified system analysis for the quotation phase

MAIA helps to assess new project concepts quickly through access to:

Customer specifications from the request for quotation
Experience from comparable system standards
Technology options including availability and supplier data
Minimum normative requirements for assessing the quote

Example prompts

“What requirements does IEC 60812 set for assessing failure modes in safety-critical systems, and what are the limits for the risk priority number?”

“Which failure modes are documented for the pump systems of our anti-heeling system, and which redundancies does the system documentation provide for?”

“Are there specific requirements from the classification societies (e.g. DNV, Lloyd’s Register) that must be taken into account when designing our anti-heeling system?”

If you have any questions, you can contact Lars Jaspersen of Hoppe Marine at l.jaspersen@hoppe-marine.com.

In summary

At Hoppe Marine, MAIA has processed more than 12 million words of industrial knowledge.
With MAIA, Hoppe Marine assesses more than 70 subsystems and components per FMECA analysis according to IEC 60812.
At Hoppe Marine, MAIA opens up more than 500 pages of standards without any manual searching.