The maritime sector is increasingly moving toward shore-based supervision of autonomous vessels through Remote Operations Centers (ROC). While technological development in vessel autonomy is advancing rapidly, the organizational, collaborative, and interface design requirements for ROC environments remain largely undefined. This thesis investigates how ROC personnel can collaboratively manage a fleet of autonomous vessels, and what sociotechnical interventions can support that collaboration.

Using Design-Based Research, the project combines observational studies and interviews across four analogous control room environments; air traffic control, railway operations, road traffic management, and offshore operations, with iterative design and evaluation of ROC concepts within NTNU’s ecosystem of autonomous and remotely operated vessels.

The project contributes three interconnected outcomes: a four-domain organizational model for ROC personnel covering navigation, marine engineering, autonomous systems, and scientific data; a set of sociotechnical interventions including a pool-based alert allocation workflow, a shared overview display, and an initial supervisor display concept; and eleven design principles for future collaborative ROC design grounded in both empirical findings and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) theory.

The findings reframe the one-to-many vessel supervision challenge as fundamentally a human factors and organizational design problem. As autonomy scales to fleets, the critical bottleneck shifts from vessel capability to human coordination capacity within the ROC. This project is an early contribution to addressing that challenge.