New Bridge Operations Quality Assurance (BOQA) capability automatically identifies safety-relevant events from vessel data, turning everyday voyages into opportunities for continuous improvement
GTT Marine, a division of the GTT Group, today announces the commercial availability of Bridge Operations Quality Assurance (BOQA), a new capability within Safety Insights by Danelec that extends the value of Voyage Data Recorder (VDR) data from post-incident investigation into proactive, continuous safety improvement.
Being introduced at SMM 2026 in Hamburg, BOQA automatically analyses vessel data to identify safety-relevant events and operating conditions that warrant further attention. This gives shipowners and operators a practical way to learn from what happens during everyday operations, rather than relying primarily on VDR data after an incident has occurred.
For more than two decades, VDRs have provided a trusted record of vessel and bridge operations, supporting regulatory compliance and helping investigators establish what happened before and during an incident. BOQA builds on that foundation by continuously evaluating the data already being captured and surfacing situations that shore-based safety teams and crews can review, understand and learn from.
Rather than requiring operators to manually search large volumes of voyage data, BOQA evaluates relevant inputs against predefined safety triggers. Depending on vessel type and available data, these can identify potentially dangerous close passing, excessive rates of turn or rudder angles, abnormal heading changes, rolling and sustained heel, excessive speed in shallow water, severe true wind conditions and sudden deceleration associated with a potential collision or grounding.
The analysis is designed to identify meaningful events rather than simply generate additional alarms. Data is evaluated over defined time periods and filtered to reduce noise and transient fluctuations, while operational context can also be incorporated. Close-passing analysis, for example, can consider Closest Point of Approach (CPA), vessel length, speed and water depth, while heading and rate-of-turn events can be assessed against parameters appropriate to vessel type and operating speed.
By automatically directing attention towards situations that merit review, BOQA helps marine, HSEQ and fleet management teams identify recurring behaviours and operational trends across vessels and voyages. Individual events can therefore become part of a broader process of investigation, learning and continuous safety improvement, strengthening the connection between what happens onboard and shore-based safety management.
“VDRs transformed maritime safety by giving the industry a trusted record of what happened when something went wrong. By leveraging that same foundation to provide safety insight while operations are still going right, BOQA ensures that every voyage becomes an opportunity to improve the next one. With BOQA, we can make proactive use of VDR data available much more broadly and give operators a practical way to learn from everyday voyages, not only serious incidents.”
- Christian Kock, EVP, Safety, GTT Marine
BOQA opens proactive bridge operations analysis to a broader range of shipowners and operators, rather than limiting it to bespoke, and therefore more costly safety programmes. It represents an evolution of the VDR from primarily a regulatory and incident-investigation tool towards a more active component of the shipowner’s digital safety ecosystem.
Available through Safety Insights / by Danelec, BOQA combines Danelec’s established expertise in VDR technology and vessel data capture with GTT Marine’s broader approach to transforming trusted onboard data into actionable operational intelligence.
Visit GTT Marine in Hall B6, Stand 525 to find out more about the BOQA solution.
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