J. Majumder, D. Vassalos, S. Sarkar, H.S. Kim, L. Guarin, A.

York,
T. Dahlberg

The Ship Stability Research Centre, Department of Naval Architecture and Marine
Engineering, the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
And
Safety at Sea Ltd., Glasgow
Human-Environment Local Interactions
and Operations Simulation
Helios Is an O.R. System
Helios Is an Omni-functional System 
An Tour of Helios

It started off as a pedestrian

simulation tool but has
subsequently been extended
to address some more
problems such as :
Fire Risk Assessment
•Creation of data input for fire
simulation.
•Fire & people co-simulation.
IMO Circ. 1033 Evaluation
Static Stability

Ballasting Decision
Support
 Representation and Processing of
Subdivisions and Compartment Definitions

Recognition of Planar Loops

Parametric Geometry Creation

Automatic Structured Panelization

Conversion to Unstructured Points to
Surface (used in meshing for CFD)
 Parrallel Optimization
GA-Server : The optimization
manager.
GA-Client : Runs the worker
processes, serves as
middleware.

Multi-objective optimization using NSGA2

 Visibility Coverage Analysis
APPLICATIONS:
•Identifying optimum location of guiding signs, TV screens, sprinklers, sensor
radio nodes etc., also evaluating and ranking positions of commercial adverts.
•Deciding positions of guards, crew, and surveillance cameras.
•Analyse the positioning of emergency signs for scenarios with smoke, in which
maximum visible distance significantly reduced.
•Design of deck-plans with the objective of its amenability to surveillance with
minimum resource.
 Multi-sensor Fusion (Envisioned but not (yet) funded)

Fusion of the monitored/sensed Data

as Scalar or Vector fields.
Field visualization for situational
awareness.
Tracking occupants using location and
identity aware tags
Front end for command/control and
announcement systems (localized
commands and announcements, 3d
audio).
Planning of port Operations by Simulation
 Significant Operations
Arrival
Trailer Operations
Unloading
Loading
Customs
 Modelling Method
•Event Driven System
•Processes Modelled using Tasks
and Events.
•Event Handlers assign/modify
tasks of mobile entities.
•Automatic, regular expression
based and event driven path
assignment
 Modelling Primitives :Events
1. A vehicle entering or leaving a road.
2. A vehicle entering or leaving an annotated region.
3. A road becoming occupied, choc-a-bloc full, or empty.
4. A vehicle parking or becoming stagnant.
5. A timer event (scheduled to happen at a certain time or after a certain
interval).
6. A periodic timer event (an event that is triggered every so many
seconds).
7. Mouse click event at a higher level of abstraction (e.g. with the
context of a point in the 3d model space that has been pointed to while
clicking, or the object that has been clicked on)
 We would have liked to use higher level tasks with > 2DOF
Modelling Primitives: Tasks for

MURRAY, M.; SASTRY, S. (1993), Non-Holonomic motion

planning: Steering using sinusoids, IEEE Transactions on
Vehicles
• Road Name
• Destination Region

Automatic Control, 38(5) 1993, pp. 700-716

• Regular Path Expression
• Arbitrary Script in Current Context
• Attach trailer
• Detach Trailer
• Run Over (not really)
• Annihilate Self

kinematic planning :
• Stop
• Wait
• Stop Until Event
• Teleport
Modelling Primitives: Roads, Lanes,
Manoeuvres

Environment can be
modelled in Helios, but
AutoCAD can be used
for fine tuning.
Simulation of Trailer Operations
Automatically produces 3D from 2D fairly accurately
 Automatic Conversion
of GA Drawing Spatial
GA Drawing Database

Processing
Pipeline
 Modelling simulation environment automatically
from CAD drawings
Triangulation
creates a cellular
topology of CAD
drawings.
The dual graph of
the triangulation is
used for path
planning.

A triangular cell
maps to a node in
the plan graph. A
pair of nodes have
an edge between
them when they
have share a side.
 Simulation environment from CAD
drawings (an example)
Cellular Topology
CAD drawing

An agent always seeks the farthest visible node on its

itinerary. Simulation

By triangulation, an agent always knows its current node.

Staircase/Ramp Generation
Concept initially tested with FLUENT

  ∂z  2  ∂z  2 
 
Minimize the integral ∫∫    +   dA
D 
∂x   ∂y 

within the projected domain

Used the Ritz method of

variational optimization with
unstructured finite elements
 Helios : The Software Architecture
• The core of Helios is a DLLs written in C++
• 600+ commands
• C++ API to use the DLL
• Persistent sessions
• The user interface is a Tcl script that dynamically
loads the Helios DLL and invokes its exported
functions.

This is probably a technological

solution to development of an
integrated software with shared IP.
 Integration Architecture
GUI 1 GUI 2 HTML Templates Scripts

Tcl Interpreter
OpenCASCADE

Oracle Berkeley

Remote Control
GA Converter

Mesh Reader
Unstructured

Open Scene
Helios Core

Fault Tree
NSGA 2
CGNS
Graph

NAG

VTK
DB
Peaceful co-existence of GPL,QPL and proprietary
codes. (Not 100% sure though, an FSF lawyer can tell
better).
 Other Results
• Recognition of enclosed space type by shape signatures.
• Symbol recognition in line drawings by affine invariant
matching and geometric hashing.
• Event generation from spatial probability density
functions.
• Regular expressions based path planning on labelled
networks.
• Animation of 3D smoothed particle hydrodynamics.
• Location aware fault trees.
• Bayesian Network (poly-tree only so far).
• Multidimensional linear regression.
 Possible Future Work
• A more comprehensive behavioural model.
• Non-holonomic motion planning.
• Inclusion of more practical operational
knowledge.
• Understanding of peculiarities of human
behaviour.
• Behaviour under crisis conditions (panic etc.)
• Panelization for arbitrary trim/heel etc.
• Automated Volume meshing for RANSE.
• More solutions.
Thank You
Questions!