IMarEST Intervention at the IMO's 12th Ship Design and Construction meeting - 20 January 2026
The IMarEST appreciates the opportunity to comment on the development of Engine Room Alert Management standards.
Our key message is that ECRAM is fundamentally different from Bridge Alert Management. BAM, under MSC.302(87), was designed for a permanently manned navigation control environment, where harmonising alerts reduces distraction and supports situational awareness for the bridge team.
Engine room operations, by contrast, involve intermittent manning, high diagnostic workload, and complex interdependencies between machinery systems. Alarms in this context are not simply notifications—they are engineering signals tied to equipment behaviour, cascading effects, and time critical fault recovery.
Where problems occur in practice, they stem from:
- poor alarm rationalisation,
- nuisance and standing alarms,
- alarm floods, and
- inadequate suppression rules.
These are design and configuration issues, not operator shortcomings.
For this reason, the IMarEST emphasises that aligning ECRAM with BAM would be technically inappropriate. Instead, development should be guided by alarm management lifecycle principles, such as those defined in IEC 62682, which sets out structured processes for design, prioritisation, suppression, performance monitoring, and continuous improvement of alarm systems across their lifecycle.
Accordingly, we encourage the Sub Committee to build ECRAM as a machinery control room specific performance standard, grounded in: human centred and socio technical design, engineering task analysis, and stakeholder engagement, including the experience of marine engineers who must diagnose and recover from abnormal conditions.
The IMarEST stands ready to support this important work.
