Off-the-Shelf Controllers for Electronic Ship Systems

This document focuses on making off-the-shelf controllers applicable for high available electronic ship systems. The goal of such systems is to reduce a ship's downtime and the resulting damage that occur within conventional electronic ship systems. In detail a standardized communication middleware, called Data Distribution Service (DDS), is used to build a fault tolerant system. After a short description of the standard, this article evolves an analysis showing that DDS can be used to build electronic ship systems out of general purpose controllers. On the one hand this is done by investigating the fault tolerant capabilities of DDS. On the other hand special attention is paid to proof that DDS can be used without constraint for any fault tolerant ship application. The analysis is completed by a maritime test set-up. At the end the advantages of using DDS are explained.