Training of Shipboard Personnel through Immersive Virtual Reality
Clients
Marine Engineering Services (MES) is a naval engineering company specialized in the design of gas carriers, chemical tankers and gas-propelled vessels.
Founded in 1986 by engineer Giorgio La Valle, who had designed the first gas carrier in 1978, MES has gained extensive field experience with more than 100 vessels built from its own designs. Collaboration with leading Italian and international clients has enabled the team to develop highly specialized expertise and successfully face major challenges in an increasingly competitive and complex market, which has seen a significant shift toward the Far East.
ENGYS, founded in 2010 by a group of engineers specialized in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for industry, is a service company focused on consulting and developing open-source CFD software solutions used for engineering analysis, design, and optimization. Its team of engineers and IT specialists provides software development services and engineering consulting across numerous industrial sectors, including automotive, motorsport, naval, turbomachinery, aerospace, energy, and manufacturing processes. Today, the company operates worldwide through a network of distributors and resellers, with six offices on four continents and more than 200 clients.
Objective
The objective of the Hi4TrAIning project is to facilitate and improve the effectiveness of onboard personnel training through immersive virtual reality, enhancing operators’ ability to act, react, and make decisions in critical contexts such as gas leaks, fires, or other hazards. Ultimately, the project aims to contribute to better emergency management on ships—particularly those powered by gas—and to ensure greater safety.
Development
To strengthen crew training, an immersive virtual reality software platform was developed, providing a fast and effective learning mode thanks to the use of 3D headsets and the reconstruction of realistic and interactive scenarios that simulate onboard emergency situations.
Over the course of several months, detailed 3D environments were created to accurately reproduce ship interiors and components. These models were integrated into an advanced virtual reality environment designed to offer the crew safe exposure to complex operational scenarios, reducing training time while increasing its effectiveness.
Data on the dispersion of hazardous gases for onboard personnel are based on artificial intelligence techniques and the processing of databases generated from high-fidelity CFD simulations carried out with open-source software. The platform has been designed to be modular and customizable, allowing the assessment of staff preparedness through dedicated KPIs. In the near future, it may also expand its applications beyond the maritime field to other sectors such as industrial plants and offshore platforms.
Hi4TrAIning was developed by the Trieste-based companies MES – Marine Engineering Services and ENGYS, in collaboration with two organizations from the SMACT ecosystem: HCI Lab – Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory of the Department of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics at the University of Udine, which developed the training scenarios in virtual reality, and SISSA mathLab, a research unit of SISSA in Trieste, dedicated to reduced-order modeling and its industrial applications. The project also benefited from the collaboration of mareFVG, the maritime technology cluster of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region, acting as coordinator of the activities.
Granted Contribution
The project was funded by SMACT through the IRISS Project Call (Innovation, Industrial Research, and Experimental Development) 2023, within the framework of PNRR – Next Gen. EU – M4C2I2.3, with a grant of €399,366.00.
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