The 14th International Conference on Computer and IT Applications in the Maritime Industries (COMPIT) will take place from 11th to 13th May 2015 in Ulrichshusen, Germany. First held in the year 2000, COMPIT has established itself as a key conference in information technology (IT) for the maritime industries, bringing together software developers and users.
Most participants come from industry, reflecting the practical relevance of the event. DNV GL will be the main sponsor of the event which covers the lifecycle of ships, offshore structures and equipment, from design to operation. The main trends are:
E-navigation as precursor to unmanned ships
E-navigation (or sea traffic management) could be considered as the maritime equivalent of air traffic control systems. Many tasks such as nautical planning and monitoring are in the process of being able to be shifted to land-based control centres. E-navigation is also a key step towards unmanned shipping. In parallel, unmanned surface vessels are being used as platforms to develop and test algorithms for autonomous navigation.
Super, tera, peta, exa – redefining supercomputing
Computing power continues to grow exponentially. This opens new applications for the maritime industry, with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) becoming a more widely used technology that is particularly greedy in terms of computational power. Frontier applications already use massive computer architectures with 200,000 cores in parallel.
Big data enters the scene
Big data uses simpler algorithms but huge amounts of data. While processing this mass of data is not the stumbling block it once was, turning the data into useful information remains challenging. However, applications have already begun to appear in fleet operation and intelligent maintenance schemes.
COMPIT covers three full days. Traditionally each day is dedicated to a major phase in the lifecycle of ships:
Day 1 – Ship design with sessions on: “Hull models”, “Simulation-based design”, “Coupled simulations”, and “High-performance computing for CFD”.
Day 2 – Ship lifecycle management and production with sessions on: “Product lifecycle management”, “IT for ship production & ship repair”, “Virtual & augmented reality”, “Marine robotics”.
Day 3 – Ship operation with sessions on: “Ship routing”, “Big data & performance insight”, “Sea traffic management”, “Towards unmanned shipping”.
“It is particularly difficult to say which session will steal the limelight this year,” says organizer Volker Bertram, Project Manager Engineering Services Newbuilding at DNV GL. “’High-performance computing’ on Day 1 is a contender. So are ‘Big data’ and ‘Sea traffic management’ on Day 3 and ‘Unmanned shipping’ where it seems it is only a matter of time before we will see unmanned cargo ships.”
DNV GL experts will be contributing several papers at COMPIT 2015 including:
Christian Cabos, Bernd Tietgen (DNV GL) , Byeong-Seog Kang, Sungho Ha (Samsung Heavy Industries), Tapio Hulkkonen (NAPA) “3d Ship Design from the Start – An Industry Case Study”
Kay Dausendschön (DNV GL)
“Big Data – Business Insight Building on AIS Data”
Knut E. Knutsen, Steinar Låg, Gabriele Manno, Grunde Løvoll (DNV GL)
“Implementing an Hadoop Infrastructure for Next-Generation Collection of Ship Operational Data”
Andreas Krapp (Jotun), Volker Bertram (DNV GL)
“Hull Performance Monitoring – Combining Big Data and Simulation”
For more information visit the COMPIT website: www.compit.info
Image: Improved data exchange for 3D models saves time and money in design and approval (as presented by Cabos et al.) Image care of DNV GL.
