THE MOB SHIFT SIMULATION FRAMEWORK

Abstract

1 DEEC/FEUP, R. dos Bragas, 4099 Porto Codex, Portugal. E-mail: jtasso@fe.up.pt 2 5141 Etcheverry Hall, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. E-mail: anouck@robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu 3 1357 S. 46th St RFS Bldg. 452, Richmond CA 94804. E-mail: natasha@path.berkeley.edu ABSTRACT MOB SHIFT is a domain specific simulation framework enabling the timely and cost-effective analysis, design and evaluation of competing Mobile Offshore Base concepts. It was developed in SHIFT, a specification language for describing dynamic networks of hybrid automata. The expressive power of SHIFT provides a compact notation for modeling spatial and logical relationships in a dynamic environment and for modeling and analyzing control strategies governing object interactions, such as the coordination and control of multiple vehicles. The simulation architecture consists of a structure of layers and of the respective interfaces. The layers of the simulation architecture correspond to building blocks of the underlying physical and control models. This paper describes the MOB SHIFT simulation framework and the accompanying tool set. MOB SHIFT permits a realistic estimate of dynamic positioning capabilities in different environments and provides a tool to uniformly design and evaluate competing multi-module dynamic positioning control systems for the MOB.