Having developed the tools for exploiting the potential of digital twins in the Open Simulation Platform Joint Industry Project, DNV has now taken the next step and is hosting the Simulation Trust Center. This provides a secure, cloud-based collaboration environment for co-simulation as a service and is already being used by customers and other stakeholders.
The maritime industry is facing accelerated growth in the complexity of integrated systems and software, giving rise to increasing challenges relating to designing, building, integrating, commissioning and operating modern ships.
Also, experience shows that, for assets that combine components and software from several suppliers, many stakeholders face system integration conflicts as well as challenges in assuring optimal system performance and change management.
In addition, there is a growing consensus that predicting the performance of complex integrated systems is a necessary requirement for maximizing efficiency and safety.
DNV believes traditional risk management methods will be insufficient going forward and that there should be a stronger focus on system performance rather than component reliability to manage increasingly complex ship systems.
A secure space for complex system configuration and simulation
The DNV Simulation Trust Center implements Open Simulation Platform (OSP) technology in an easy-to-use and secure collaboration space, where you can upload and share access to component models and explore and configure multiple system models and variations. Time domain simulations allow for understanding of dynamic behaviour.
The functional mock-up interface and co-simulation have been adopted as a standard and, through open-source software and interface standardization, our approach will enable cross-organizational and cross-platform cooperation to solve common challenges associated with system integration and change management.
Providing a solution where a system digital twin of an asset can be easily accessed and updated for simulation use cases from the early design phase, through commissioning and into operation can support a range of services throughout the lifecycle of integrated systems and will support lifecycle management.
The Simulation Trust Center is already in use and is available for testing by companies, including system suppliers, integrators and operators.
Alternative fuels, hybrid and battery systems are essential to meet the decarbonisation challenge.
Designing optimal system configurations and integrate complex systems can certainly be supported by using our Simulation Trust Center.
Therefore, we invite interested customers to test this collaboration platform.
Pierre Sames
Dr.-Ing, Director Group Research and Development
DNV AS
The benefits
The Simulation Trust Center has been developed to enable the best use to be made of the OSP at all stages of a vessel’s lifecycle. This use can confer several benefits, including the secure sharing of access to simulation models by different stakeholders and provides IPR protection by using black box simulation models and secure simulation in a cloud environment. The Trust Center also makes configuring integrated systems easier and provides a scalable environment for running system simulations and sharing results. In addition, as dynamic properties are modelled, systems can be simulated in multiple environmental conditions likely to be encountered in the physical asset’s operational service.
The current solution focuses on simulation models and the next steps of the project will work towards integration with control system (software in the loop) setups.
