Maritime Activity Reports, Inc. (Photo: IMO) As the maritime industry continues to develop and test the technologies required for safe autonomous vessel operations, many regulatory questions have remained. Setting out to help answer some of these questions, the International Maritime Organization's (IMO) Maritime Safety Committee (MSC) has recently completed a regulatory scoping exercise to analyze relevant ship safety treaties, in order to assess how maritime autonomous surface ships (MASS) could be regulated. The scoping exercise was initiated in 2017 to determine how safe, secure and environmentally sound MASS operations might be addressed in IMO instruments, ad its completion represents a first step, paving the way to focused discussions to ensure that regulation will keep pace with technological developments, the IMO said.