Mobile bridge - a portable design siimulator for ship bridge interfaces

Developing new software components for ship bridges is challenging. Mostly due to high costs of testing these components in realistic environments. To reduce these costs the development process is divided into different stages. Whereas, the final test on a real ship bridge is the last step in this process. However, by dividing the development process into different stages new components have to be adapted to each stage individually. To improve the process we propose a mobile ship bridge system to fully support the development process from lab studies to tests in realistic environments. Our system allows developing new software components in the lab and setting it up on a ship bridge without interfering with the vesselʹs navigational systems. Therefore it is linked to a NaviBox to get necessary information such as GPS, AIS, compass, and radar information. Our system is embedded in LABSKAUS, a test bed for the safety assessment of new e‐Navigation systems.