Distributed and redundant design of ship monitoring and control network

Abstract

The world trend in ship automation is to integrate the monitoring, intelligent control and systematic management of the instruments and equipments both on bridge and in engine room. The paper presents a design scheme of the ship integrated monitoring and operating system based on two layers distributed and redundant computer network. The lower layer network is the field bus network connected mainly by CAN bus; the upper one is the PC local network in TCP/IP protocol, which consisted of a database server, monitoring and operating computers, industrial computers and a set of switches. Distributed schemes are fully applied to both software and hardware. This paper specifically describes the composition, software distribution and redundant technology of the upper local network and gives some important sample codes for the implement of the redundant and distributed design. The technologies here have been proved in the many applications and it may be applied to other industrial fields.