Operative and Procedural Cooperative Training in Marine Ports

TL;DR

This paper presents an advanced cooperative training system for marine port operations, integrating hardware-in-the-loop simulators for ship navigation and port control to enhance operator training realism and effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed interoperable simulation system with realistic models and hardware integration for marine port operator training.

Findings

Validated ship motion model with 6 DOF accuracy

Developed realistic 3D port and vessel environments

Successfully integrated simulators using IEEE 1516 standard

Abstract

This article faces the problem of operative and procedural cooperative training in marine ports with particular attention to harbour pilots and port traffic controller. The design and development of an advanced system, equipped with dedicated hardware in the loop, for cooperative training of operators involved in the last mile of navigation is presented. Indeed, the article describes the software and hardware development of a distributed and interoperable system composed by two simulators (the bridge ship simulator and control tower simulator). Multiple problems are faced and solved including (i) the motion of the ship at sea that is based on a 6 Degree Of Freedom (DOF) model for surge, sway and yaw and closed form expressions for pitch, roll and heave and its validation; (ii) the development of the 3D geometric models and related virtual environments of a real marine port and vessel (to provide the trainees with the sensation to experience a real port and ship environment); (iii) the design of a bridge ship replica, the bridge hardware integration and the design of the visualization system; (iv) the design and development of the control tower simulator; (v) the integration of the bridge ship simulator and control tower simulator through the IEEE 1516 High Level Architecture standard for distributed simulation.