History
PROTIDE has been under development since 2007. Then a three phase project started that at first only consisted of a usability study under interested parties. The second phase was a feasibility study on the calculation method and the final phase (which we are in now) is to transfer the prototype application to a fully functional application that can be used in the daily process of calculating tidal window advices.The current release
During the prototype phases there always has been a live version of PROTIDE, but this release is the first one that is fully functional:- live data updates out of MATROOS with relevant predictions for water levels, swell and water speed / direction
- a state-of-the art ship motion algorithm developed by Amarcon is in place
- user management authorization schemes
- stable / tested calculation of safe time intervals
- optimized performance
- a full history of data, requests, specific ships, calculations and advices
- ability to manually adjust predictions if the data isn't accurate or to perform a sensitivity analysis
- combine predictions of different sources when one source isn't sufficient
- installation on two dedicated servers and configured for optimal availability and performance
- configurable tidal window calculation method, calculation settings and safety criteria
- scaling of hull shapes based on given characteristics and a ship type
- report functionality of advices and documentation
Next steps
At the time of the release point PROTIDE was coupled to the latest available predictions of relevant data and makes use of the most recent OCTOPUS application to model ship motions. Although these are the most recent, updates are expected on both components, because MATROOS is being extended with extra data sources especially for PROTIDE and OCTOPUS is updated to perform better squat calculations. As soon as these are available, PROTIDE will be updated, tested and released.
With the extra predictions and the final OCTOPUS it is necessary to start a calibration process of the PROTIDE calculation. This because it is to be investigated how many iterations and how precise the algorithm must run, to ensure the safety criterion. Then the algorithm will also be tested on historical data to calculate harbor statistics.
The calibrated version of PROTIDE will then be presented to the user groups. If all goes well, we will start a process of using, testing with possible updates of the application between August and December. The objective is to start using PROTIDE as the sole algorithm for tidal window advices in the Rotterdam and Amsterdam harbor starting the first of January 2010.