Powerful Technology to Support Ship Design and Maritime Planning

Project ENDEAVOR’s team members: from left: Donald Fabozzi, MHPCC; Uday Kari, PDC; Chris Chiesa, PDC; Steve Kunitzer, PDC; and Dr. Bob Dant, MHPCC. ENDEAVOR uses a map-based interface to support ship designers and marine planners around the globe.

The Pacific Disaster Center is helping the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) to bring the power of Geographic Information Systems to bear on ship design and marine transportation planning at a global scale.

Project ENDEAVOR ("Environment for Design of Advanced Marine Vehicles and Operations Research"), which is funded by the Office of Naval Research and is still under development, leverages the power of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) massive worldwide database of historical ocean conditions, and provides an easy-to-use geospatial interface to support marine planners and ship designers alike. The database contains gridded model output for environmental ocean conditions at three hour intervals dating back to 1998--information which can be extracted, statistically processed and visualized through the ENDEAVOR interface. Click here to further explore Project ENDEAVOR’s goals and capabilities.

Users will have the ability to interact with a web-based map of the world’s oceans, select locations for prospective routes, and receive analysis regarding factors that might impact voyages including wind conditions and wave action. Pacific Disaster Center leveraged its "Map Viewer"--used to support previous disaster-related projects in American Samoa, Marikina City, Philippines, Hawai’i, and in response to the recent Indian Ocean Tsunami--to provide the project with its geospatial web-based interface.

Says Donald Fabozzi, MHPCC’s Project ENDEAVOR Technical Lead, "Project ENDEAVOR brings the power of a large information asset--NOAA’s global database--into an easy-to-use graphical environment. By developing a more sophisticated insight into ocean conditions, marine ship designers and mission planners can use this dynamic application to support their decision-making processes."

"ENDEAVOR’s potential uses are wide-ranging," says PDC Senior Manager Chris Chiesa. "They include helping to prepare for long ocean voyages and facilitating planning for inter-island travel between the Hawaiian Islands."

ENDEAVOR’s power can support disaster management logistics as well--it has already been used by the Center of Excellence in Honolulu to assess relief and recovery supply logistics in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Concludes Chiesa, "Applying PDC’s map-based interface to environmental databases makes it much easier for planners and designers to sift through a massive volume of data and retrieve only what is needed to make a specific decision. This project has also benefited our Map Viewer development at PDC as it levied--and we solved--some pretty challenging requirements for selecting and viewing time-series data from an extremely large database."