Maana and Aramco Trading Company Launch AI Application to Optimize Maritime Fleet and Shipping Operations

Aramco Trading Company (ATC) and Maana today announced the launch of Fanar, the first Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven maritime fleet optimization application on Microsoft Azure purpose-built for the oil and gas industry.

Fanar combines the expertise of ATC and the Maana Q knowledge technology. It unifies maritime fleet optimization, planning, management and shipment scheduling on a single platform. The application:

• systematically integrates all data sources, constraints, and business rules
• automatically optimizes schedules across the fleet with a single click
• rapidly processes “what if” scenarios for better insights
• dynamically incorporates historic performance to generate new predictions

Fanar has been tested daily by ATC since June 2020.

“Collaboration between Maana and Microsoft helps us, through Fanar, to drive down costs,” said Ibrahim Q. Al Buainain, President and CEO of Aramco Trading Company. “Fanar enables us to optimize all local decisions across our maritime shipping and logistics workflows.”

Based on any given a set of cargoes and fleet of vessels, Fanar can determine how to ship the cargo in a way that minimizes cost, optimizes fleet utilization and maximizes business value. It continuously computes dynamic criteria such as vessel locations and actuals; terminals and ports status and congestion; bunkering locations, costs and quality; vessel cleaning; time and spot chartering costs; weather; risk of piracy, terrorism or war; risk of labor and social unrest resulting in closures; epidemics; shipping routes; canal fees; charter party specifications; Contracts of Affreightment (COA); commodity prices; special considerations; business rules and more.

“Under the hood of Fanar is the digital twin of ATC’s global maritime operations,” said Babur Ozden, founder and CEO of Maana. “It is the largest digital twin in the world on Microsoft Azure for global maritime shipments of oil and gas, holding the history, present state and future simulations of billions of barrels of petroleum products, thousands of voyages and vessels.”

“Maana is a founding technology member of Energy Core, a global Microsoft initiative dedicated to digital transformation in the energy sector, through the power of artificial intelligence and cloud technologies,” said Darryl Willis, Corporate Vice President of Energy at Microsoft. “Fanar is a great example of how Maana and ATC are using Microsoft Azure for supply chain optimization.”

The Fanar application is available to Azure customers. For more information, please contact Fanar@maana.io

About Aramco Trading Company

Aramco Trading Company (ATC) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Aramco and is responsible for handling Saudi Aramco’s domestic and international supplies to worldwide markets. ATC’s mission is to integrate Saudi Aramco’s global Downstream assets to maximize profitability while ensuring Saudi Aramco’s systems are optimized and reliably balanced.

About Maana

Maana organizes human expertise, enterprise knowhow and industrial data into digital knowledge to assist subject matter experts at critical operation affecting the global economy.

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Contact information

Mandi Browning
mandi@maana.io