| The power driving installation of an engine room is the vital part of a ship. As has been proven by facts and become a consensus in the international shipping industry, that, as a modern seamen's training facility, the Marine Engine Room Simulator (hereafter referred to as "MERS" in short) can help the efficient and fast bringing-up of modern engine room management personnel. The IMO emphasizes several times in the STCW 78 / 95 the function and importance of MERS and sets forth both stipulations and proposed requirements regarding the application of MERS in the seafaring training, while the China MSA also stipulates on the assessment items for the training by MERS in her newly laid "Syllabus for Seamen's Competence Examination and Assessment".The research on the trial use of MERS started from as early as 70's in the countries with advanced marine technology. Yet the engine room simulator was then only a small sized or computer-supported desktop trainer. With the development of computing technology, the new marine engine room simulators emerged from time to time until mid 1980's when it was developed into multi-computer assisted simulating system, its working site and the hardware being gradually able to correspond to the real ships. Since 1990's the network technology has been applied to the engine room simulators, as provide the data communication between marine engine facilities and computer network, thus expanding the sub-network of student stations. Due to the constant improvement on the MERS, its role in the seafaring education and training has become more and more apparent, and likewise, its research and development have been receiving more and more concerns from the shipping industry both at home and abroad. Though we were a little later in this field, the engine room simulator developed by our own country in the late 90's reached next to the world level. Our seafaring institutes and colleges have gradually started the respective education and training by use of MERS. Nevertheless, as the simulating technology involves the integrated high-techs and knowledge of computers, networks, images and graphs, multi-medias, software engineering, information processing and automated control, the simulating system is affected by its own characteristic-featured conditions, running environment and trainingrequirements, thus yielding many problems that exist in our marine engine room simulators being currently used. For example: the MERS system has poor working stability and high rate of breakdown; Its viewing device is yet to be updated, as the true aspect of the engine room can not be seen during training; The teaching display board can not display the running state of the system with 3-D animations, neither can it change the dynamic flow chart, etc. the afore-said problems have been greatly retarding the seafaring teaching and training, and restricting the application value of MERS, as a consequence.This dissertation focuses on the research on some important issues of existing MERS in term of its technological development, and probes into the methods of technical improvement, with the hope to enhance the functions of the MERS, and raise its working efficiency.The dissertation covers the topics as follows: 1) Based on the studies of the net structure of MERS, the ideas offered to use the star-type network with server exchanger as its center; 2) By the comprehensive application of virtual, simulating and computer-based graphing technology, to work out a highly-intelligentized engine room simulating system; 3) the probes into designing a dynamic displaying flow chart for the MERS by use of grand viewing screen with projector and of computer-based graphing technology; 4) Studies offered of the intelligent diagnosis of equipment errors, by which, the simulating system would be able to give early warnings before error occurs. It has to be noted, that the researches given in this dissertation may not be mature. Yet, based on the intentions to improve the technical application of MERS and on the philosophy of... |
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