Any company involved in maritime or offshore operations has a wide range of training needs from ordinary familiarization to handling special operations and inherent risk. In many instances you will have the required coaching competence in your own organization. In some cases, training on board will be a good and efficient solution, in other cases this will be expensive or time-consuming to arrange. In such situations we offer rental of our state-of-the-art Kongsberg simulators.

Our simulators have models of real ships and equipment in daily use onboard. At time being we have models of semi-submersible rigs, shuttle tankers, coasters, anchor handlers, construction ships, ROV control room, shift supervisor station, work ROV, knuckle boom crane, wire luffing crane, diesel/ electric engines for ship and rig, high voltage and LNG bunkering stations. We can rent additional models from Kongsberg Digital’s library and – we can produce special models that has not yet been developed.

The SIMSEA simulators are delivered and updated by Kongsberg Digital and Fugro Intersite and certified by DNV-GL. As per today we have

5 Bridges, K-Sim Offshore with DP, DNVGL Class A

2 DP bridge trainers; NI class A and B (K-Pos, SDP)

6 ECDIS stations/bridges

Ship/rig offshore crane

2 Engine control rooms

1 High Voltage panel (real equipment according to NMA specifications)

1 DeepWorks subsea simulator, including ROV control room (Kystdesign),

All our simulators are integrated and can be used for advanced complex operations. Each simulator can also be used on a stand-alone basis. You will find our simulators very realistic and we provide different natural forces influencing your operations like weather, current, wind and heavy seas. The only thing missing is the fresh sea air.

We provide the necessary support like set-up of simulators for simple exercises or operating the simulator equipment for more complex training needs. We will also provide any administrative support, any documentation of the training and catering.

If you have any questions or want to examine this opportunity in detail don’t hesitate to contact Lars Gustavsen, telephone 913 89 783 or A Rune Johansen at telephone 909 30 668.

Simsea has now got accreditation from the Norwegian Maritime Authority (NMA) to provide both Basic and Advanced training according to the IGF Code. The courses are relevant for masters, officers, ratings and other personnel on ships subject to the IGF code. The courses could also be useful for personnel at LNG farms.

Please note that we as a part of the course run bunkering operations on Kongsberg Engine Room Simulators and that 2 Bunkering Operations at the Advanced course is approved by NMA.

Basic course:

By this course the participants shall gain basic knowledge to be able to contribute to the safe operation of a ship subject to the IGF code. Safe operation includes to prevent hazard, apply occupational health and safety precautions and measures, carry out firefighting, respond to emergencies and to prevent pollution of the environment.  

The content of the Basic course is in accordance with STCW A-V/3-1 including the following aspects of operating ships subject to the IGF code:

• Rules and regulations
• Design and operational characteristics
• Fuel characteristics, fuel systems and fuel storage systems
• Fuel and fuel storage systems’ operations
• Physical properties of fuel
• Safety requirements and safety management
• Hazards associated with operations and hazard controls
• Gas-measuring and similar equipment
• Safe working practices and procedures
• Fire organization, fuel hazards, firefighting agents and methods including fire-fighting system operation
• Emergency procedures
• Measures to be taken in the event of leakage/spillage/venting of fuels

Advanced course:

By this course the participants shall gain familiarity with physical and chemical properties of fuels, competence of operate controls, ability to perform all operations, plan and monitor bunkering of a ship subject to the IGF code. This includes competence to take precautions to prevent pollution, secure compliance with legislative requirements, to prevent hazard, apply occupational health and safety precautions and measures, how to prevent fire and to control firefighting and extinguishing systems.  

The content of the course is in accordance with STCW A-V/3-2 including the following aspects of operating ships subject to the IGF code:

• Safe bunkering including planning and monitoring
• Operating principles of marine power plants
• Ships’ auxiliary machinery
• Marine engineering terms
• Design and characteristics of ships, systems and equipment
• Fuel system theory and characteristics including pumps
• Effects of pollution
• Measures to be taken in the event of spillage/leakage/venting
• MARPOL, other relevant IMO instruments, industry guidelines and commonly applied port regulations
• Hazard and control measures
• Safety equipment
• Safe working practises and procedures
• Firefighting methods and appliances

Simsea has over the years trained thousands of deck officers to avoid and handle challenging situations that can occur on-board a ship. The deck officers typically come from all kinds of trades and ships. We train them in leadership, situation awareness, stress handling, decision making, communication, teamwork, etc. However, and that is a paradox, we very seldom train engineers! Now, our engine room simulators are not in use.

This is primarily a paradox because most incidents on-board a modern ship is caused by issues in the engine room. The incident at Hustadvika in Norway this year where a cruise ship faced server trouble is in fact not a special case. It doesn’t require much fantasy to imagine the stress the engineers must have felt on-board Viking Sky when the ship drifted towards striking rocks or hopefully a solid attachment for the anchors.

Many sailing engineers have no experience from such situations and the sad truth is that nor are they trained to handle them. It is of cause a big difference from day to day routine work in the engine room to problem solving under severe stress. Very capable engineers working as instructors in Simsea confirm this. Most maritime engineers need to be trained in handling engine trouble under server stress. This includes beeing on top of the situation; dicover and understand, and maintain a proactive attitude to the circumstances surrounding them. At the same time they need to be capable of share their observations, understanding and actions with colleagues and bridge to create a shared situation awareness.

Remember, “a safe ship has engineers that can handle a crisis as well as routine work”. Practice makes perfect.

Simsea now offers many training courses where we combine simulator training with e-learning. We call this blended training.

So, why do we do this?

In our continuous improvement work we focus on changes that meet our key success criteria:

• Increased learning outcome
• Credible documentation
• Reduced training costs

Our training schemes traditionally consist of a practical doing part and a part where we teach the relevant theory behind the doing. The Practice doing part place in simulators and is prepared by a thorough brief and summed up by a debrief where student reflection is an important element. Most of the theory has been taught in classroom lectures.  An important issue for us has been to find a more effective learning method for teaching theory than classroom lectures often characterized by challenges like students’ mixed motivation, mixed competence and lack of a common terminology.

We have landed on e-learning as our main method for teaching theory. In an e-learning module theory will typically be presented by text, pictures and videos. And – each part of the module will have tests that the student shall have to pass. We run all e-learning on a separate specially designed computer program. Computers facilitates the presentation of educational material according to students’ learning needs, as indicated by their responses to questions, tasks and experiences. In this way e-learning is adaptive, it is student active, it facilitates common competence and terminology and – it assures and document the learning outcome.

Our blended training approach is approved by the governmental bodies like NMA and has been well received by all stakeholders. The customers appreciate it because it means more value for money; the increase in learning outcome, the credible documentation and the reduced costs by reducing number of days at the simulation center. The individual course participant appreciates it because it reduces the stay away from home and family.

FORCES AT SEA

A seagoing vessel is subjected to forces from wind, waves and current as well as from forces generated by the propulsion system. The Dynamic positioning – DP automatically maintain the vessel’s position and heading using its propellers and thrusters.

The vessel’s response to these forces, i.e. its changes in position, heading and speed, is measured by the position-reference systems, the gyrocompass and the vertical reference sensors. Reference systems readings are corrected for roll and pitch using readings from the vertical reference sensors. Wind speed and direction are measured by the wind sensors.

The K-Pos dynamic positioning control system calculates the forces that the thrusters must produce in order to control the vessel’s motion in three degrees of freedom – surge, sway and yaw – in the horizontal plane.

CONTROL PRINCIPLES

The K-Pos system is designed to keep the vessel within specified position and heading limits, and to minimise fuel consumption and wear and tear on the propulsion equipment. In addition, the K-Pos system tolerates transient errors in the measurement systems and acts appropriately if a fault occurs in the thruster units.

AVAILABLE DYNAMIC POSITIONING SYSTEMS

• Go to Dynamic Positioning system overview

RELATED

• DYNAMIC POSITIONING SYSTEM MODES AND FUNCTIONSOur dynamic positioning systems can be operated in a variety of different modes.
• IMO DP CLASSIFICATIONOverview of IMO dynamic positioning – DP Class requirements
• DYNAMIC POSITIONING SYSTEM REDUNDANCY PRINCIPLEA dynamic positioning system is a system that automatically controls a vessel’s position and heading exclusively by use of active thrust.

TRAINING

Simsea is accredited by Nautical Institute (NI) to provide DP training. The training consists of two courses; DP Induction and DP Simulator. Each course takes 5 days and includes training on our K-POS DP simulators. Candidates have to document a certain amount of seatime between the courses and after before they will get their DP certificate from NI.

Simsea is also accredited to provide DPO certification by DNV GL. The training includes courses and seatime between the courses. In addition, candidates need to take a specialization course for the kind of vessel they will work on. After these courses candidates have to pass a theoretical and practical test before they get their DPO certificate from Simsea.

As many of you might have experienced the ECDIS training based on IMO/STCW requirements is not enough to give navigators the necessary in-depth understanding. We now offer an e-learning model, called ECDIS-SITAWARE that we claim meets this shortcoming. Our approach is focusing on the necessity to raise the navigators’ awareness of the technical limitations and the pitfalls for unsafe use of ECDIS in various situations.

In this course unsafe use of ECDIS is not understood as poor motivation, rather, limitations and pitfalls are explained in a concrete manner using simple language.

The course is based on a real incident and covers four main themes:

1. Scale Issues

2. Wrecks and Obstructions

3. ENC quality and Alternative Information Sources

4. GPS and AIS positioning

The course starts with an introductory chapter explaining what it means to have situation awareness regarding ECDIS. Ten chapters then covers one awareness aspect each concerning ECDIS use. Each Chapter follows a common pedagogic template in three parts:

1) a short presentation of the awareness aspect,

2) an example taken from a real grounding accident, and

3) a multiple-choice question activating the learner and testing understanding at the same time

The course takes the average learner about 1.5 hours to complete.

Each chapter can also be printed out in standard A4/Letter format as reflection sheets. This makes excellent supporting material for reflective discussion amongst navigation officers. The learners will get an immediate feed-back on their test score in %. In addition, the learner and their employer will receive an overview of the test result.

The course software can be used on smartphone, tablet or PC.

ASOG training should be based on job specific scenarios (SOW), field layout, vessel and platform models and likely weather conditions. The learning objective is to secure that the participants understand the SOW and have obtained experience in practicing the ASOG procedures as required.

The training should take place in a full-scale simulator and include coaching in technical as well as human factor skills related to

• Ship handling
• Operation of DP
• Use of maneuvering equipment
• Situation awareness
• Fatigue and stress handling
• Teamwork and communication
• Leadership and decision making

DPOs shall obtain experience in how to handle any emergency and crisis scenarios including manual takeover when needed in situations such as:

• thruster failures
• increasing weather
• reference systems
• drift off
• loss of switchboard
• drive on
• drift on using tugs

We recommend that the participants as a pre-course activity review SOW and relevant ASOG procedures thoroughly to be well prepared for the simulator training. This activity should be structured in an e-learning module including multiple choice tests after each lesson. Such E-learning will take place on Simsea’s web-based training platform which is available at lap-top, tablet or mobile phone.

The training and assessment in full-scale simulators at Simsea will typically lasts for two days and consists of two parts:

Part 1: E-learning module to study the SOW and ASOG procedure including a test to document learning outcome. The test will be repeated in the beginning of part 2.

Part 2: Simulator training including a scenario for each learning goal and facilitates a comprehensive review of project procedures in a realistic environment. All personnel involved in the training will be given familiarization in use of simulators and related equipment.

We recommend to use two simulator bridges for each shift of 6 bridge officers. In such a case we will have two DPOs at each bridge. Captain and Chief Officer train in their roles; they will follow the exercises from the instructor room, enter the bridge when they are called for and participate in the assessment of the bridge teams.

A thorough brief will be carried out before each exercise to define exercises based on customer’s and participants’ need and to secure a mutual understanding of the purpose of the exercises. During the brief one will also address assessment criteria to be used.

Execution of simulator exercises will be performed as on board per relevant procedures and will be observed and coached by Simsea instructors as well Captain and Chief Officer (one bridge each).

A debrief, a mutual lesson learned and feedback session will be performed after each exercise. This session will include evaluation of learning outcomes for the participants and the results of any assessment.

We will use two K-Sim Offshore bridges including K-Pos DP2 for the training sessions. Both bridges are certified as Class A simulators by DNV-GL. The ship dynamics is simulated on the K-sim offshore vessel simulator. The K-sim offshore vessel simulator integrates advanced physics engines with hydrodynamic modelling of the highest quality to provide realistic ship behavior and interactions. From the simulators instructor station, one can provoke faults in the vessels propulsion plant, power management system, thrusters and sensors. It is also possible to adjust weather conditions such as wind, waves, swell, current, precipitation and visibility.

A fully integrated model of Edda Fauna is set up on DP 200 meters from the installation in question to perform the specified operation. The DP system is set up using typically 3 DGPS, 1 HiPAP and 1 FANBEAM as reference systems. A broadcast voice recording system is available for monitoring communication on bridge.

If you have any questions or inquiries please contact

Lars Gustavsen
Tel:        +47 913 89783
Mail:     lg@simsea.no