Generic modeling and analysis framework for shipboard system design

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel modeling and simulation environment for ship design based on the principles of Model Integrated Computing (MIC). The proposed approach facilitates the design and analysis of shipboard power systems and similar systems that integrate components from different fields of expertise. The conventional simulation platforms such as Matlab®, Simulink®, PSCAD® and VTB® require the designers to have explicit knowledge of the syntactic and semantic information of the desired domain within the tools. This constraint, however, severely slows down the design and analysis process, and causes cross-domain or cross-platform operations remain error prone and expensive. Our approach focuses on the development of a modeling environment that provides generic support for a variety of application across different domains by capturing modeling concepts, composition principles and operation constraints. For the preliminary demonstration of the modeling concept, in this paper we limit the scope of design to cross-platform implementations of the proposed environment by developing an application model of a simplified shipboard power system and using Matlab engine and VTB solver separately to evaluate the performance with different respects. In the case studies a fault scenario is pre-specified and tested on the system model. The corresponding time domain bus voltage magnitude and angle profiles are generated via invoking external solver, displayed to users and then saved for future analysis.