A Hardware-In-The-Loop Simulator to Design and Test Ship Motion Controllers

This paper presents the design of a Hardware-In-The-Loop (HIL) simulator to design and test ship motion controllers. The proposed HIL simulator consists of two main blocks, the ship model computer and the control computer. The ship model computer simulates a real cargo ship as a 3D dynamic model based on its 6-DoF mathematical model using Unity software. Meanwhile, the control computer will be a real programmable embedded controller built by Matlab/Simulink software. In addition, KEPServerEX software is suggested to act as an I/O interface between the ship model and the controller. The proposed simulator is tested with many different operating scenarios of the ship at sea to calculate the fuel consumption of the main engine and some other parameters in each case. The test results show the model's reliability and can be used to study motion control algorithms for ships to improve fuel efficiency.