Automated Paper Chart Creation from Electronic Navigational Charts

The Canadian Hydrographic Service is reaching out to industry with a Request for information (RFI) to define potential budget and solutions for the creation Paper/POD/RNC Charts. The objective of this exercise is to see if industry has the potential technology/capacity to generate a Paper/POD/RNC chart from an S-57/S-101 file and what steps CHS needs to take to get data in a proper format to realize this process. The goal is to release a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) next fiscal year with associated budget for a solution for Paper/POD/RNC chart production. Under Canada’s Ocean Protection Plan, the Government of Canada is building a world-leading marine safety system that will protect Canada's coasts. https://www.tc.gc.ca/eng/oceans-protection-plan.html 15 years ago, the Canadian Hydrographic Service (CHS) moved to a new chart production approach, with a database production environment, to generate Electronic Navigational Charts (ENC)/Paper products such as Print-On-Demand (POD) and Raster Navigational Charts (RNC). Paper/Raster chart production in this environment still takes tremendous amount of resources. In addition, CHS is still facing challenges for datum adjustments (horizontal and vertical) and metrification of its entire portfolio. Paper is still today the ultimate backup solution to ENC’s and CHS need to provide this product to its clients. That product can be different than what we are used to. With the tsunami of new data coming to CHS, emerging S-100 standards, new generation of mariners/hydrographers and more needs for dynamic up-to-date information, CHS wants to leverage the Ocean Protection Plan to address important challenges relative to the production of Paper/POD/RNC Charts. CHS wants to focus on ENC production with its internal cartographic capacity and leverage industry Hydrographic/Cartographic Artificial Intelligence to automate the creation of Paper/POD/RNC products. It is estimated that 50-100 charts will be produced per year. The use of IHO S-52 and/or IHO S-4 symbology, and variations of these standards are allowed in order to enable the automation and eliminate the requirements for traditional manual editing. Product needs to fulfill IMO SOLAS 5 requirements and Canada’s Charts and Nautical Publications Regulations, 1995. How many of these products do you need the contractor to create? > This would follow regular ENC production (50-100 charts per year), full migration strategy of all products is not defined yet, this RFI will help to put the strategy toguether