The difficulties of ship-handling in the harbor area are increasing due to not only marine traffic congestion, but also very large ships, high speed ships, and natural environments(typhoon, fog, etc.). In addition, human errors have been some of very serious problem in marine accidents. Judging from these, ship manoeuvring simulators are necessarily required evaluate and improve safe navigations. Ship manoeuvring simulators has been used to train mariners, assess safety, develop harbour and port and design ships, etc.
Many PC-based simulation systems, for example Norcontorl Co. Ltd, Transas Co. Ltd, Marinesoft Co. Ltd or Poseidon Co. Ltd, have come with very high levels of fidelity that allows meaningful training outcomes to be achieved with many operational functions and tasks.
This paper deals with construction of desktop-type simulator system for ship manoeuvring. The following contents will be discussed.
(1) There are many important factors for developing the ship manoeuvring simulator. One is the mathematical model of ship manoeuvring. The others are two or three dimensional graphic technique, network technique, programming technique, and etc. By using technique, the author defined the mathematical model for ship manoeuvring and adopted the ENC(S-57) file and OpenFlight database File for construct of the new two dimensional map file. So, the author analyzed for structure of the S-57 file and OpenFlight database file. The present simulator system contains the INSTRUCTOR_ STATION, the MOTION_SOLVER, the 3D_VISUAL and the RADAR system. The visual-C++ with MFC(Microsoft Foundation Class) and API(Application Programming Interface) tool has been adopted for development of ship manoeuvring simulator. The INSTRUCTOR_ STATION, the MOTION_SOLVER, and the RADAR system has been made from the new 2 dimensional map file and the 3D_VISUAL system has been made from commercial software, MultiGen-Creator and Vega.
(2) The berthing/deberthing operation is the peculiar work owned to a marine pilot and a dock master. In the port or the shipyard, the berthing/deberthing operation requires considerable concentration and bears dangerousness. When ship moves at the low advance speed, the tug utilization is getting increased. In the present system, the author carried out the berthing/deberthing operation by using tugs in the external forces due to strong wind. The author discussed the evaluation technique of manoeuvring difficulty.
The present simulator systems are communicated with the LAN(local area network). It was constructed so that each simulator could run the simulation at the same time. Using the proposed 2 dimensional map file, the author could more easily construct the database(terrain model) and exactly fitted 2 dimensional to suit 3 dimensional on this system. So, the present system can be utilized mainly as a facility for maritime research and training.
Using the present system, we carried out manoeuvring simulation experiment in order to grasp correlation between the subjective rating scale and the indices of manoeuvring difficulty. The degree of manoeuvring difficulty has strong correlation with the tug index(the tug boat used time and power). But, the evaluating method of manoeuvring difficulty requires more simulation experiment data for more clear correlation.