Experience from SIMMAN 2008—The First Workshop on Verification and Validation of Ship Maneuvering Simulation Methods

The SIMMAN 2008 workshop was held in Copenhagen, Denmark in April 2008. The purpose of the workshop was to benchmark the prediction capabilities of different ship maneuvering simulation methods including systems- and CFD-based methods through systematic quantitative comparisons and validation against EFD data for tanker (KVLCC), container ship (KCS), and surface combatant (5415) hull form test cases. For the KVLCC test case, two stern shape variants named KVLCC1 and KVLCC2 giving different instability loops were included. Free model test data was compared with systems-based methods and CFD for specified free maneuvers. Some of the systems-based methods used provided PMM and CMT data, and two used CFD instead. CFD-based methods were used to simulate forced motions and were compared with PMM/CMT model test data. The submissions were blind in the sense that the benchmark model test data was not provided prior to the workshop, unless data was required as input to the simulation method. A total of 64 submissions were received for the free maneuver simulations, which included a wide range of the state-of-the-art methods in use today, such as PMM- and CMT-based methods, CFD based methods, system identification, neural network tools and various empirical methods. For the forced motion simulations a total of 16 submissions were received, comprising different CFD-based methods such as RANS, URANS, and DES. This paper gives an overview of hulls, model tests, test cases, submissions, comparison results as well as the most important observations and conclusions.