Webinar Series

We are starting up a new series of our webinars. The topic this time is software and tools for modeling and simulation and the scope is methods and approaches to cross-domain and cross-tool simulations.

The webinars should be of interest to modeling & simulation (M&S) professionals as well as software teams supporting M&S based services. The webinars are open and anyone can join!

We have scheduled three webinars in November and December:

17. November Marine applications of co-simulationGlenn Tørå, cDynamics
01. DecemberDTASM: A portable and sandboxed package format for executable simulation modulesMoritz Allmaras & Harald Held, Siemens Energy
15. December
Postponed to 2023. New date will follow.
Interoperability and running FMUs with special constraintsThomas Haraldsen Evang, Kongsberg Maritime

All the webinars are short 30-min presentations and scheduled from 13:45-14.15. The webinars are hosted on Teams (we use the same Teams link for every webinar).

We intend to follow up with more webinars in 2023. If you have suggestions for topics and speakers reach out to Asle.Pedersen@uia.no.

Webinar (17/3): Digital teknologi muliggjør nye og bedre forretningsmodeller

"Business Model Concept" by Alex Osterwalder is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0.

(The webinar will be in Norwegian language)

GCE NODE og SFI Offshore Mechatronics inviterer til å lære mer om hvordan bedrifter kan lykkes med å bevege seg videre fra tradisjonelle produktorienterte forretningsmodeller.

Påmelding til webinaret gjøres her.

Program (17.mars)

12:00
Velkommen

12:05 
Hva kjennetegner transformasjon fra tradisjonelle produktorienterte forretningsmodeller til mer tjeneste- og ytelsesorienterte forretningsmodeller?
Hvordan må virksomheter endre interne virksomhetsprosesser, samt deres organisasjonsstruktur og -kultur for å lykkes med overgangen?
Presenteres av Handelshøyskolen ved Universitetet i Agder , Professor Tor Helge Aas

12:25
Hvordan kan aktører i tradisjonell industri oppnå legitimitet i sine økosystemer når de lanserer nye tjenesteorienterte forretningsmodeller og smarte tjenester?
Presenteres av Handelshøyskolen ved Universitetet i Agder , PhD Stipendiat, Marius Trandheim Kristiansen

12:45
Spørsmål og diskusjon

13:00
Avslutning

Tor Helge Aas er professor på Handelshøyskolen ved Universitetet i Agder og forsker I ved NORCE Norwegian Research Centre AS. Han har en doktorgrad i strategi og ledelse fra Norges Handelshøyskole (NHH) og forsker på innovasjonsledelse, med et spesielt fokus på de organisatoriske effektene av innovasjon, innovasjonsprosesser og -kapabiliteter, innovasjonssamarbeid og styring av innovasjonsaktiviteter. Marius Trandheim Kristiansen er stipendiat ved Universitetet i Agder, og han arbeider med oppgaven “Digital Technologies enabling Business Model Innovation in Manufacturing” som en del av arbeidspakke 7 i SFI Offshore Mechatronics.

Offshore Wind Spin-off opportunities (Workshop June 3.)

On June 3. (9-11.30 CET), GCE Node in collaboration with WP7 of SFI Offshore Mechatronics invites to a digital seminar/workshop to explore opportunities within Offshore Wind. In the seminar regional companies such as Origo Engineering and Agder Energy will present their activity within the offshore wind market from a technology and investment perspective. Research results from some of the SFI mechatronics workpackages with an emphasis on results with current and future applications in offshore wind will also be presented.

The seminar will be closed with a discussion to identify opportunities for new spin-off projects and transfer of results, technology and knowledge from the centre to solve current and future challenges within offshore wind.

To view the program and register for the event visit this page.

PhD Defense WP4.3 on March 19

PhD Defense: March 19 – Lars Ivar Hatledal – NTNU Aalesund

Lars Ivar Hatledal has for his defense of the PhD degree at NTNU, handed in the following thesis:

“Protocols and Standard for Co-Simulation – For demanding maritime operations”

The opponents of the thesis are:

Associate Professor Tiina Komulainen, OsloMet, Norway
Professor Agris Nikitenko, Riga Technical University, Latvia
Associate Professor Henrique Gaspar, NTNU (Administrator)

The trial lecture took place on March 19, 2021, at 10:15 on the following topic: «Co-simulation toolbox – How to implement co-simulation in an industrial environment».

The actual defense took place on March 19, 2021, at 13:15.

Both the trial lecture and the defense were public.

The main supervisor has been professor Houxiang Zhang at NTNU Aalesund. Co-supervisors have been professor Geir Hovland at the University of Agder and university lektor Arne Styve at NTNU Aalesund.

ABSTRACT:
There is a strong demand for innovation and efficiency within operations, life cycle services, and design of maritime systems. Modern vessels operate increasingly autonomously through strongly interacting sub-systems. These systems are dedicated to a specific, primary objective of the vessel or may be part of the general essential ship operations. The sub-systems exchange data and make coordinated operational decisions, ideally without any user interaction. The task of designing, operating, and integrating life cycle services for such vessels is a complex engineering task that requires an efficient development approach, which must consider the mutual interaction between the inherent multi-disciplinary on-board sub-systems. Digitalization thus has become a key aspect of making the maritime industry more innovative, efficient, and fit for future operations.

However, no one simulation tool is suitable for all purposes and the plethora of modeling tools within different disciplines exists for very good reasons. Issues related to integration of heterogeneous systems and hardware, memory, and CPU utilization makes implementing complex-cyber-physical systems, like vessels, in a monolithic or centralized manner undesirable.

Co-simulation alleviates this issue, allowing different sub-systems to be modeled independently, but simulated together. Co-simulation refers to an enabling technique, where different sub-systems making up a global simulation are being modeled and run in a distributed fashion. Each sub-system is a simulator and is broadly defined as a black box capable of exhibiting behavior, consuming inputs, and producing outputs. A crucial point is that it allows users to simulate models exported from different tools in a unified manner. Compared to more traditional monolithic simulations, co-simulation encourages re-usability, model sharing, and fusion of simulation domains.

Co-simulation can be expanded into the realm of digital twins by feeding sensor data measured from the real world into the models, which in turn closes the loop by providing actionable feedback. A digital twin can be defined as a virtual representation of a physical asset enabled through data and simulators for real-time prediction, optimization, monitoring, controlling, and improved decision making. As the digital twin mimics its physical counterpart, it can be used to estimate a vessels performance before running any tests in the real world. This not only offers flexibility, but also cuts down costs to a great extent. These proxies of the physical world will help companies in the maritime industry in developing enhancements to existing products, operations, and services, and can even help drive business innovation.

This dissertation aims to drive adoption of co-simulation standards and development of use-cases by providing software that makes co-simulation simpler and more intuitive. This includes enabling technology for building standard-conforming models and systems, and subsequent tools for simulating them. The case studies presented show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

From left to right: Co-Supervisor Arne Styve, main supervisor Houxiang Zhang, Dr. Lars Ivar Hatledal who successfully defended his PhD thesis, and Co-Supervisor and centre director of SFI Offshore Mechatronics Geir Hovland.

Webinar: Presentation about ONNX

We have observed a trend with an increase in use of AI and ML as part of the research in SFI Offshore Mechatronics. A few examples where AI/ML is used is fatigue prediction (WP3), prediction of remaining useful lifetime of fiber ropes (WP5) and machine vision based people tracking (WP3). 

Interoperability and standardization of AI/ML is crucial for industrial adoption and to efficiently bring inference models from the lab and into realistic industrial environments.  

ONNX is an example of a standardization efforts with extensive industry support. Beckhoff is one of the companies with support for ONNX. In our webinar on the 18th of March, Fabian Bause, Product Manager at Beckhoff will tell us more about this. You will find information on how to join the webinar in this page.

PhD Defense at NTNU Aalesund, Feb 3rd

Thiago Gabriel Monteiro will defend his PhD-thesis on February 3rd. The title of his thesis is “A Cross-Modal Integrated Sensor Fusion System for Fatigue and Awareness Assessment in Demanding Marine Operations”

The trial lecture will be held at 10:15 of the given theme:
«What other models and methods than data driven can be used to study mental fatigue in maritime operations? Discuss the advantages, disadvantages and applicability to maritime operation situations, and describe situations for which the various methods are recommended. Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of these methods in linking mental fatigue to operator and system performance, and discuss the challenges with internal and external validity of the methods presented».

The public defense will be held at 13:15.

Both the trial lecture and the defense are open for all that are interested. Due to the pandemic situation, this will be done online. You can participate through the link below.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://NTNU.zoom.us/j/92825819123?pwd=WVg2VkRIUFI3UUFDaWtITWR1ZEUvQT09
Meeting ID: 928 2581 9123
Passcode: 000122

Join by SIP
92825819123@zoomcrc.com

Join by H.323
162.255.37.11 (US West)
162.255.36.11 (US East)
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213.19.144.110 (Amsterdam Netherlands)
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Meeting ID: 928 2581 9123
Passcode: 000122

Join by Skype for Business
https://NTNU.zoom.us/skype/92825819123

Webinar: Introduction to the Julia programming language

The topic of our webinar on February 18th (13.45-14.15 CET) is the Julia programming language. The webinar will be presented by Mattias Fällt which is about to finish his Phd degree at the department of automatic control, Lund university. The Julia programming language has in recent years gained a lot of traction and popularity for scientific computing but also industrial applications. Not to be covered in this webinar, but it is worth mentioning that the Julia community is very active in the area of Scientific Machine Learning (SciML). SciML is an active research area concerned with bridging scientific computing (e.g. physical modeling and simulation) with machine learning. Use this link to join.

Webinar: Real-time containers

The topic for our webinar on February 4th (13.45-14.15) is real-time containers. The topic will be presented by Florian Hofer which is in his last year of his phd project at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. His research is related to using (Linux) containers (e.g. Docker) for real-time industrial control applications.

Florian will present some of the motivation for this approach, introduction to important considerations for real-time Linux and containers as well as experimental results. Florian has recently been a visiting researcher in the iCyPhi project co-funded by Siemens, Toyota and Denso. You can find one of his most recent publications here.

Use this link to attend.