Vessel-fender contact force modelling for a real-time ship manoeuvring simulator

This paper presents the development of a method for calculating the horizontal contact forces between two bodies in a real-time ship manoeuvring simulator. The method was implemented in the simulator of the University of São Paulo, whose computing core is named “Dyna”. The model proposed calculates restoration and friction forces between bodies and has a Momentum-Impulse based criterion to reduce numerical issues when the simulation numerical integration has large time-steps. The model was empirically evaluated at the simulator by deck officers, in real-time simulations with pilots and tugmasters. We also ran simulations of that model to compare its performance under different integration time-steps lengths.