COMPIT 2013 Covers Latest Developments in Ship Design and Shipbuilding

This year’s International Conference on Computer and IT Applications in the Maritime Industries (COMPIT) covered a broad spectrum of the latest developments in ship design and shipbuilding, IT trends and marine robot technology. Organised by Germanischer Lloyd (GL), the conference took place for the twelfth time, having established itself as a leading conference in the IT field for the maritime industries.

The conference, which attracted about 80 participants, also serves as a contact platform for recruiting and the preparation of international R&D projects. Some 45 presentations were given by maritime software developers and users, providing direct insight into how modern IT applications are evolving within their own organisations and the industry.

One of the speakers, Stefan Harries, of GL’s subsidiary Friendship Systems, presented “Port Efficiency Simulations for the Design of Container Carriers”, which allow quantitative consideration of cargo handling times for container vessels already in the conceptual design stage. The method is based on a statistical approach. For many randomly chosen combinations of containers on board, containers to be handled in port, and assigned cranes, the required time in port for a vessel can be determined. For the presented case studies, the differences in port efficiency are shown to be considerable.

Another presentation dealt with advanced simulation technology. Volker Bertram, of GL’s subsidiary FutureShip, gave an overview of “Advanced Simulations for Offshore Industry Applications”, based on the experience of a simulation service provider (FutureShip) and a major simulation software vendor (CD-adapco).

FutureShip’s Heikki Hansen explained in “Lean ECO-Assistant Production for Trim Optimisation” how streamlining processes brought down total response time and cost for the CFD-based trim optimisation tool.

GL’s Henner Eisen described in “High-Performance Finite-Element-Based Fatigue Assessment Processes for Ship Structures” how complex processes in structural analyses can be streamlined. Current fatigue assessment processes were analysed and streamlined based on the GL ShipLoad software. The resulting software tool demonstrated that fatigue assessments can be performed economically for entire ship structures, requiring similar user effort and computational times as classical (design load) methods.

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Press Release, April 18, 2013; Image:gl