Modeling and Simulation of Maritime Systems and Operations for Virtual Prototyping using Co-Simulations

Today, the maritime industry is facing stricter environmental requirements and a demanding market requesting greener and more advanced technology promoting lower emissions and higher fuel savings, increased operational safety and reduced operational weather dependencies. This, while the competition for new contracts forces a significant decrease in both price and "time-to-market". The Norwegian maritime industry has an edge when it comes to advanced technology and expertise in complex maritime operations. In order to keep this position a strong focus on innovation is crucial. However, the Norwegian maritime industry is also affected by high costs related to high wages and high research and development spendings. The reduced oil price, which the Norwegian maritime industry is strongly dependent on, does not help either. Hence, the Norwegian maritime industry has been forced to look for ways to reduce the high costs while at the same time maintaining a technological lead on competitors. This, through an increased focus on developing more advanced engineering technologies and methods which result in improved toolboxes that streamline work tasks and reduce both the amount of billing hours and the "time-to-market". One such technology, which has demonstrated promising properties in both the aerospace industry and the automotive industry, is virtual prototyping using distributed co-simulations, although bringing forth new challenges that need attention. The knowledge building project Virtual Prototyping of maritime systems and operations (ViProMa) was initiated in 2013 with the vision of investigating some of these challenges and to bring distributed co-simulation technology into the maritime industry. This is also the vision in this thesis. The work presented in this thesis is carried out in the ViProMa project and is divided into three parts. The first part, consisting of Chapter 2 to Chapter 4, gives an introduction to co-simulations in general, as well as revealing some of the challenges related to using co-simulations in maritime industrial applications. The first chapter gives an introduction to the essentials in co-simulations and highlights the similarities between a general co-simulation system and a general sampled systems. Also, an introduction to both the co-simulation standard High Level Architecture (HLA) and the de-facto standard Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) is given, where the latter is the one used in both this thesis and in the ViProMa project. An open source co-simulation software named Coral was developed in the ViProMa project and will be used in this thesis for conducting most of the co-simulation case studies. Also, a discussion relating system modularity, cosimulation scenario handling and configuration of co-simulations is provided........