ISO 18131:2025

Overview

ISO 18131:2025 - Ships and marine technology - Publish-subscribe architecture on ship-shore data communication - General requirements - defines general requirements for using a publish-subscribe (pub/sub) architecture to exchange operational data between shipboard and shore-based systems. The standard targets interoperability, scalable data streaming, and secure ship‑shore communication by specifying roles (broker, publisher, subscriber), topic naming, message format and a cloud-oriented multitenancy data management approach.

Key topics and technical requirements

• Publish‑subscribe architecture: Describes the broker-mediated model enabling one‑to‑one and many‑to‑many data flows and real‑time streaming suitable for IoT and maritime applications.
• Roles and behaviour: Defines responsibilities of the message broker, publisher, and subscriber, including store‑and‑forward, filtering and prioritization.
• Multitenancy and cloud data management: Requirements for serving multiple tenants while isolating tenant data and metadata in cloud environments.
• Security requirements: Measures to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of ship‑shore data, including authentication, authorization for topic access, and transport encryption expectations.
• Message format and topic naming: General requirements for client identifiers, hierarchical topic name structures (with multi-level topics and wildcards), and a data model specifying headers and payloads.
• Functional data management: Operational requirements such as data backup, recovery, and log/event storage management to support robust maritime operations.
• Interoperability focus: Emphasizes consistent data models and topic taxonomy to enable integration across vendors, fleet managers, port services and on‑shore platforms.

Practical applications and users

ISO 18131 is practical for:

• Shipbuilders and marine equipment manufacturers integrating vessel systems with shore platforms.
• Software vendors and platform developers implementing pub/sub brokers or data services for maritime fleets.
• Fleet managers, shipping companies and port service providers using real‑time operational, navigational, environmental and maintenance data for analytics and decision support.
• System integrators and cloud service providers building multitenant maritime data platforms.

Use cases include real‑time condition monitoring, remote diagnostics, emission reporting, smart port integrations and scalable IoT telemetry from vessels.

Related standards

• IEC 61162 series (marine navigation interfaces)
• ISO 19847, ISO 19848 (shipboard data servers and standard data)
• ISO 23807 (ship‑shore asynchronous transmission)
• ISO 24060 and IEC 61162‑460 (referenced for logging and Ethernet interconnection)

ISO 18131:2025 helps stakeholders implement secure, interoperable ship‑shore data communication using pub/sub patterns - improving efficiency, scalability and data reuse across maritime operations.