Splash247: Hormuz has exposed shipping’s new visibility divide

Wolfgang Lehmacher and Mikael Lind on maritime informatics.

The Iran war has shown how precisely you can hit a target – and how little some of the maritime world can see of the blast wave across trade.

Missiles and drones around the Strait of Hormuz left several tankers damaged, seafarers dead and roughly 150 ships at anchor in and near the chokepoint, while hundreds more waited outside. Marine insurers cancelled war risk cover for parts of the Gulf, driving up costs and forcing operators and charterers to replan in an emergency. AIS data captured tankers and LNG carriers pausing or reversing course in the Gulf of Oman; within days, tanker traffic through Hormuz had “collapsed”, with multiple ships struck and widespread GPS and AIS interference reported across the wider area.

At the tactical level, this is a precision conflict. At the systemic level, it still looks like fog of war.

Many of those coping better with the shock are the actors with the clearest models. Analyses of ship movements suggest some operators are simulating alternative flows – via ship-to-ship hubs off the UAE, different loading patterns at Gulf export terminals, and revised onward schedules – while others rely on ad hoc diversions and last-minute changes. For the first group, disruption becomes a set of scenarios to explore. For the second, it remains a string of unpleasant surprises.

This is the emerging visibility divide: between actors who can simulate a sea lane, and those who can only react to it.

Ports already deploy digital twins that blend real-time ship movements, tidal and ocean data and historical patterns to improve voyage planning and port calls. Rotterdam and Singapore, for example, have trialled exchanging port-to-port timestamps along their green and digital corridor to optimise arrivals, cutting idle time, fuel burn and emissions. Terminal and network level twins model ship calls, crane deployment and yard flows, allowing operators to test changes and disruption scenarios in software before implementing them on the quay.

Extend that logic along a corridor, and you get a lane-level twin. Integrate AIS tracks, port calls, berth windows, inland capacity and customer commitments, and you can estimate the impact of diversions, skipped calls or port congestion, then adjust stowage, schedules and stocks accordingly. The effective ‘decision half-life’ of a closure can fall from weeks to days.

But only a handful of carriers, platforms and data vendors operate sophisticated models of key corridors. Smaller owners, regional terminals and many forwarders and cargo interests, particularly in emerging markets, often lack both the data access and the tools to see beyond their own movements.

Maritime informatics defines how information systems can increase the efficiency, safety, ecological sustainability, agility and resilience of world shipping, and stresses the need for higher transparency, predictability and visibility. Its concept of information-sharing communities, such as the Virtual Watch Tower initiative, is simple but radical: situational awareness arises when many actors along the chains share small pieces of data under agreed standards and governance, rather than each building an isolated solution, tower or dashboard.

That is the design choice facing the sector. Sea lane twins can either evolve as proprietary black boxes, sold back to the rest of the chain as premium services, or as infrastructure: a shared sensing layer combining AIS-based nowcasting with basic operational data that others can build on. Competition would not disappear; there would still be room to differentiate on forecasting skill, optimisation algorithms, and customer-specific solutions. But in an era of precision strikes and weaponised chokepoints, the ability to see the system has become a precondition for resilience.