Physikalische Testfeld-Architektur für die Unterstützung der Entwicklung von automatisierten Schiffsführungssystemen

The navigation of a vessel is increasingly automated by the support of modern technology aboard a vessel and on shore, which assist people in safe navigation or perform the navigation and operation out independently. The development of these automated vessel navigation systems is characterised by interlinked and loosely coupled systems from various manufacturers. This leads to a steadily growing amount of complex systems which fulfil safety-critical functions as a cyber-physical system in the context of maritime transportation. For system development with regard to the correct functionality of automated vessel navigation systems, intensive verification and validation methods are applied. A testbed helps to promote verification and validation (V+V) throughout the entire system development process and enables testing of the system under test in a simulative or physical environment. The heterogeneity of the systems to be tested and the extensive requirements of the system development methodology for these innovative systems result in challenges for the design of current maritime test setups. These are individually designed for specified test scenarios and not sustainably constructed, because their design does not follow a structured method.

This research work develops a system architecture for a sustainable and reusable physical testbed, which is oriented to the established methods of system development. This supports the methodology of systems engineering to enable validation of an automated ship navigation system and verification of its implementation according to the technological design. The approach supports the V+V methods during different phases of the system development cycle and considers the normative requirements of the maritime domain. An implementation of the physical testbed LABSKAUS within the context of the maritime reference platform eMIR transfers the system architecture of a physical testbed developed in this work into practice. Representative application scenarios of LABSKAUS are carried out for the examination of the applicability and verification of the requirements fulfilment which permits an evaluation of the approach.

The presented systematically developed system architecture for a physical testbed reduces integration efforts for systems to be tested and supports the reusability of the testbed. This leads to effective testing of complex systems and components with lower system development costs.