About Us
The Vessel Operators Forum (VOF) is a platform for ship owners, operators, designers, yards, suppliers, R&D-institutes and regulatory agencies and class societies to exchange experience on operational aspects of ships and to discuss the common need for new technology for future ship operations. The Forum meetings will be combined with progress meetings of relevant joint industry projects (JIP’s) initiated and supported by the vessel operators. The VOF meeting will be organized by MARIN and will be hosted by one of the members. VOF was officially launched on November 21, 2007 in Gothenburg at the occasion of the progress meetings of the Lashing@Sea JIP and the Service Performance Analysis (SPA) JIP hosted by Stena.
Meetings are organised every 6 months.
New Vessel Operator Forum chairman
A new chairman of the Vessel Operator Forum (VOF) was appointed, due to the retirement of Henk van den Boom, who established the VOF in 2007. The legacy will be continued by Patrick Hooijmans, Team leader of the Transport and Shipping team. The VOF will continue its valuable research into better ships from both a safety and economic point of view. These topics are the focus of the ongoing JIP’s TopTier, FC-series propellers, WiSP3, Tripping, Alert and STA Group.
Our Mission:
To support vessel operators with adequate R&D and maritime technology development in a joint effort with all stakeholders
Our Vision:
THE VOF will be a platform for ideas, where:
Technical issues can be identified, commonality gauged, and JIPs spin-off where independently supported.
Proposed JIPs can be presented to the right people in all the organizations involved at one time.
Our Strategy:
- Focus on performance, structural and energy saving issues
- Meet regularly, move the venue around the world to share the burden of travel
- Present on topical issues, mix with information sharing and field trips to local areas of technical interest.
- Invite organizations proposing JIPs to speak
- Include the right organizations – designers, owners, fabricators, regulatory agencies, operators, class societies.
- Liaison with related technical organizations