Investigation And Design Of The Integrated Ship Control System

In recent years, China's shipbuilding industry is in a period of rapid development. However, in the field of ship automation, due to the fact that the technology of domestic civilian ship control equipment falls far behind that of shipbuilding powers, most of the production and sales of ship control equipment are monopolized by those well-known international suppliers of ship control systems. At present most of domestic ship control systems are based on analog instruments and independent of each other, and lacks the comprehensive platform for the management of resources and information on the entire ship. All of these lead to complicated operation, low control precision and poor control performance, and make the on-line fault diagnosis and system maintenance more difficult, so it is unable to meet the needs of ship-owners. Currently there are no domestic companies which can provide a whole solution for the integrated ship control system, not to mention the well-established global service system. Therefore, based on the research and analysis of the leading ship automation technology and products in the world, this paper proposes a design plan for integrated ship control system. The main achievements and innovations are described as follows,1) After the analysis of traditional ship control system, a design plan for integrated ship control system is proposed, which is based on distributed control units. And after the analysis and comparison of the two plans, this paper concludes that: the design plan can not only overcome the shortcomings of traditional ship control system, but also meet the various needs of ship control, due to its flexible structure. So based on the design plan, the overall design for integrated ship control system has been made.2) Due to the special environment on the ship, design methods of environmental adaptability and reliability of the ship control system have been discussed, in order to make the ship control system adapt to the marine environment.3) Detailed designs for the engine control system and power plant control system have been made, which are two core subsystems of engine room control system, including the overall system structure, main function and control program design.4) According to the design plan for integrated ship control system based on distributed control units, integrated ship control simulation system has been achieved on the platform of Supcon WebField ECS-100 control system. Test results show that the design plan has achieved a good control effect. The system not only provides the comprehensive platform for the management of resources and information on the entire ship, making operations and management more centralized while keeping the control functions of each subsystem distributed, but also makes controllers, operator stations and display control consoles of each subsystem connected by the ring network throughout the entire ship, and makes field devices connected to the nearest distributed remote IO units. So it can greatly reduce the use of cables, improve the stability of signals, make configuration and installation for the control system more flexible and scalable. The design plan not only makes construction and maintenance for the control system more convenient, but also can effectively reduce the number of crew and make the whole control system more secure, reliable and efficient.