Artificial Intelligence for Product Design

For more details, please also see


For many years, NTNU in Ålesund (formerly Aalesund University College) has acted as a hub for both education, research, and innovation in close relationship with surrounding industry and authorities, and in particular, with the Global Centre of Expertise (GCE) Blue Maritime Cluster, with headquarters in Ålesund and at the Norwegian Maritime Competence Centre (NMK). Together, NMK, NTNU, and Ålesund Knowledge Park (ÅKP), which also hosts the cluster programmes Blue Legasea and Norwegian Rooms, constitute what we may refer to as Campus Ålesund.
The maritime industrial cluster, which is one of only three clusters awarded the prestigious GCE title by the Norwegian Innovation Clusters Programme, is a world leader in design, construction, equipment and operation of advanced special vessels for the global ocean industry. By the end of 2016, GCE Blue Maritime consisted of 13 design companies, 14 ship yards, 19 shipping companies, 170 ship equipment suppliers, 16,000 employees, and a total turnover of about 61.5 billion NOK.
Together with two companies in the maritime cluster, ICD Software AS, a provider of industrial control systems software, and Seaonics AS, a designer and manufacturer of offshore equipment, the SoftICE Lab received funding from the Research Council of Norway and its Programme for Regional R&D and Innovation (VRI) for two independent but related research projects for using artificial intelligence (AI) for intelligent computer-automated design (CautoD) of offshore cranes (Kunstig intelligens for krandesign (KIK), grant no. 241238) and winches (Kunstig intelligens for vinsjdesign (KIV), grant no. 249171), respectively.
Our main focus was on the development of a generic and modular software framework for intelligent CautoD of maritime products, exemplified by said cranes and winches. Whilst we have achieved the goals of the two research projects mentioned above, we wish to emphasise that our work easily can be extended to other products and CautoD methodologies.

More information

We have previously presented some details of our work on intelligent virtual prototyping of cranes and winches in earlier blog posts:

A summary of the two projects can be found on Crane and Winch Projects.
The project resulted in 7 conference papers: Publications and Presentations.

Acknowledgements

The SoftICE lab at NTNU in Ålesund wishes to thank ICD Software AS for their contribution in the software development process, and Seaonics AS for providing
documentation and insight into the design and manufacturing process of offshore cranes. We are also grateful for the support provided by Regionalt Forskningsfond
(RFF) Midt-Norge and the Research Council of Norway through the VRI research projects Artificial Intelligence for Crane Design (Kunstig intelligens for krandesign
(KIK)), grant no. 241238, and Artificial Intelligence for Winch Design (Kunstig intelligens for vinsjdesign (KIV)), grant no. 249171.

Collaboration?

Parties interested in research collaboration, testing our software, or more information are encouraged to contact us.