LINCOLN: The new European Project for the Marine Space

LINCOLN (Lean Innovative Connected Vessels) is a 36 months project coordinated by Politecnico di Milano, Cineca collaborates by implementing an HPC platform for the design of boats and ships for rescue at sea.

The project addresses a sector particularly relevant for the world economy, the Marine Space, where Europe needs to identify and develop new solutions, products and services that enable European industry to position itself as a key competitive player.

The LINCOLN project aims to propose added-value specialized vessels able to run requested services for Marine Aquaculture, Ocean Energy, Coastal Monitoring, Control and Surveillance, and Rescue sectors in the most effective, efficient, economic valuable and eco-friendly way.

These design and development projects will use an innovative fact based design model approach, which combines real operative data at sea with lean methodology, in order to support the appropriate development and implementation of the new vessel concepts, enhance the competitiveness of the EU shipping sector and maximise opportunities for innovation in the European shipbuilding and maritime equipment industry.

LINCOLN will use ad hoc IT tools, customized for the Maritime environment, to support the Lean Fact Based Design enabling the acquisition and the usage of field data, coming from an IoT platform and High Performance Computing- HPC- Simulation.

In particular LINCOLN will develop and deliver three types of radically new vessels concepts, through dynamic simulation model testing: a multi-platform catamaran to serve as Service crew vessel and Multipurpose survey vessel, a high-speed patrol boat and an Emergency Response and Recovery Vessel (EERV) for coastal rescue activities. They will be built by the shipyards involved in the project and tested in operational environments. This will allow to test the Lean Design platform that combines IoT and HPC that is the main objective.

The main task of the Consortium will be to realize a virtual naval basin, a Simulation as a Service system able to provide a numerical estimation of the hydrodynamic resistance given a hull geometry and a set of operative conditions (e.g. velocities). This activity acknowledges and rewards the excellence of the Consortium technicians in the field of Computational Fluid-Dynamics (CFD), developed in many projects and partnerships, such as those with Teams Luna Rossa and Oracle for the 34th edition of the prestigious America’s Cup.

LINCOLN is a project funded by the European Union Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 under G.A. n. 727982.

More information on Lincoln web site