3rd Party Software

As well as developing its own products, GRC has a proven track-record in developing software on behalf of other organisations. Examples include:

DRIO

Developed for: United Kingdom Ministry of Defence TES-SSG

In 2007, on the back the very successful SIO contract, GRC won a contract to design a system to centrally manage and issue surface ship and submarine design data to UK MoD contractors. For more information see DRIO

SIO

Developed for: Maritime Commissioning, Trials and Assessment (MCTA)

In 2004 GRC won the tender for the development, supply and support of a replacement for the SIO system, for more information see SIO

OptiHull

Developed for: QinetiQ Haslar (http://www.qinetiq.com)

In 2002 GRC was tasked with creating OptiHull, a replacement for QinetiQ’s Hull Database Design System (HDDS). HDDS was a database of ship hull forms with associated powering, model test and trials data running on a UNIX platform, it allowed the user to choose an appropriate existing hull form based on defined criteria and distort it to produce a new concept design. QinetiQ wanted the capability of HDDS to be re-coded in a modern programming language with an easy to use GUI and new distortion methods added.

GRC decided to create new objects within the Paramarine infrastructure to reproduce the functionality provided by HDDS. Implementing HDDS in this way gave QinetiQ access to the vast modeling, stability, powering and seakeeping capabilities already available in Paramarine, reduced the development cost and time and utilised Paramarine’s existing GUI which QinetiQ were familiar with. GRC also wrote a migration tool which allowed for the existing HDDS database to be read into Paramarine. The program was delivered on time and was well received by QinetiQ.

LR Naval Ship Rules

Developed for: Lloyd's Register of Shipping (www.lr.org)

GRC and LR had already collaborated closely, observing each others' developments and integrating them on a pilot basis when in January of 2001 LR placed a task with GRC for the implementation in software of the Naval Ship Rules (NSR). NSR have been under development over a number of years, overseen by an internationally-represented Steering Group. By January of 2000 the Rules themselves were essentially completed in written form. It remained to develop the necessary software to provide automatic assessment of ship's structure against the rules. Lloyd's Register already has very advanced software for the assessment of commercial steel ships (Ship Rules) and Special Service Craft (SSC Rules). GRC were tasked to write the Naval Ship Rules elements to dovetail with Lloyd's Register's own computational architecture. The first phase of this ambitious project, involving extremely close co-operation between the two independent software houses, completed in July of 2001. The resulting software has been well-received both by LR, and by the UK Ministry of Defence who had expressed a keen interest in its development.

IMCS - Stability Engine

Developed for: CAE Inc., of Canada (www.cae.com)

CAE were developing the Integrated Management and Control System (IMCS) for the UK Royal Navy's new Landing Platform Dock (LPD) vessels, HM Ships ALBION and BULWARK. IMCS provides the crew of these vessels with the ability to control and manage the ship's systems from numerous linked terminals throughout the ships. One key requirement was to be able to assess the ships' stability under any circumstances including any conceivable disposition of stores, military vehicles, etc., or damage to the ship resulting in flooded compartments. A geometrical computer model of the LPDs already existed in the UK Ministry of Defence design system GODDESS and the Ministry was unwilling to have a whole new model generated specifically for IMCS. Thanks to their expertise in GODDESS, GRC were approached to integrate the GODDESS stability calculator within CAE's IMCS. The work was completed in three months and delivered to CAE in March of 1999.

ENVISION-DIS interface

Developed for: United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, Defence Procurement Agency (www.mod.uk)

In 1998 the UK MoD embarked on a Simulation Based Design project codenamed Vitesse. The purpose of the project was to test the capability of off-the-shelf simulation tools when applied to the problems of early design of naval ships and equipment. A key requirement was to be able to link remote simulations together using the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) protocol. To that end, GRC developed an interface enabling the simulation package ENVISION to participate in DIS simulations. ENVISION is developed and supplied by Delmia Corp. (www.delmia.com), now part of Dassault Systemes. The GRC interface software was used to enable several computers running ENVISION to participate together to simulate aircraft handling operations in a future aircraft carrier.