First held in the year 2000, the International Conference on Computer and IT Applications in the Maritime Industries (Compit) has established itself as a key conference in information technology (IT) for the maritime industries, bringing together software developers and users.
The 14th edition of Compit will take place from 11-13 May 2015 in Ulrichshusen, Germany. The event 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
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.
Image: Improved data exchange for 3D models saves time and money in design and approval (as presented by Cabos et al.) (by DNV GL).
