Hans-Christoph Burmeister

Hans-Christoph Burmeister is heading the Department 'Sea Traffic and Nautical Solutions’ at Fraunhofer-Center for Maritime Logistics and Services CML in Hamburg, Germany, which he joined in 2011. Fraunhofer CML conducts professional contract research for private and public sector clients in the maritime industry, including ports, terminal operators, shipping companies and logistics service providers and his department is focused on evaluating and optimizing safety and efficiency of sea traffic as well as developing innovative ship navigation solutions and maritime technologies. Additionally, he is the Director of the Fraunhofer Innovation Platform for Smart Shipping at Novia University of Applied Sciences FIP-S2@Novia.

Besides his activities in industrial research projects, Hans-Christoph Burmeister coordinated the internationally known European research project MUNIN on unmanned vessels from 2012 to 2015 as well as the Autonomous Navigation Test-Bed development for Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering from 2015 to 2016. Thereby, his main focus was on COLREG-compliant collision avoidance algorithms. 2016 he furthermore initiated as technical coordinator the European Maritime Simulator Network EMSN as well as afterwards its Asian sibling APMSN. Currently he is active in the German project FernSAMS developing a remote and autonomous controlled tug.

His academic background is industrial engineering, where he holds a diploma from the University Erlangen-Nürnberg writing his diploma thesis in the area of Operations Research about "pick-up and delivery problems with time windows”. Besides his work for Fraunhofer, he is currently finalizing his doctor thesis at Hamburg University of Technology on "Development and Assessment of Autonomous Navigation Systems”.