Autonomous marine operations are difficult to plan, design and perform. Additionally, the complexity of these operations is increasing as they often include more than one vehicle. The AJA (Autonomous Job Analysis) method is a structured approach to gathering the necessary information from experts in order to plan and design an autonomous marine operation and document these facts to make the scope of the operation understood by all stakeholders. This paper presents additional methods that enhance AJA. First, the AJA canvas: a visual tool for organising the information obtained by AJA in a concise way. Secondly, a structured format for writing measurable requirements extracted from the AJA process to help in the design of the operation. Lastly, the tools are demonstrated on a test case scenario where several vehicles will collaborate in order to detect and map a plume of contaminated water from a wastewater facility outlet.

Several design methods and principles have been presented so far, in order to guide the design of autonomous operations. Putting the required efforts into learning and using the methods for designing autonomous operations is a daunting task. Experiences so far have shown that the use of methods meant to the help the design process are often ignored. One reason could be that the design guidelines are too complex and contain much information often not relevant for the project at hand, and therefore there is no easy way to distinguish what is important from what is not. This is an issue that needs to be solved with our approach. In this article, the Autonomous Job Analysis (AJA) method is presented. The proposed methodology is created in order to guide the design of autonomous operations in maritime systems by breaking them down in to sub-operations in order to reveal challenges, needs and limitations regarding autonomous behavior. The canvas contains the categories of the AJA method on a single page format -the canvas- and each category is supported with questions to be asked during the design procedure, as well as example answers. We will describe the AJA method and the AJA canvas in detail, and present a use case scenario of an autonomous operation in order to show how they can be applied. The particular use-case is the design of an autonomous operation for the detection, inspection and tracking of a waste water plume.