Liophant News

No.0 - Dec 1996

The Liophant on the International Set

In occasion of the Genoa Simulation Conference, the Liophant Simulation Club officially proposes itself to the Scientific and Technical Community. The members of the Club already attended to International events, but the Conference Simulation in Industry was the perfect opportunity to present our group to the representatives coming from all around the world. In this wonderful surround the President of the International Society for Computer Simulation (SCS) awarded the Club for its efforts with the title of official Chapter of the SCS.
Let’s point out what is the Liophant Simulation Club?
It’s an Association born in Genoa University to promote and diffuse the simulation techniques and methodologies. As major activities we can summarize:

· Exchanges and educational helps in computer simulation for students, support for sabbatical years.
· Organization of meeting on simulation: i.e. we support the organization of European Simulation Symposium 96 Simulation in Industry in Genoa.
· Organization of courses and stages in companies to apply simulation to real problems.
· Survey of the advances of Simulation world-wide and distribution of reports on the news in this area.
· Attendance to conferences world-wide: members of our Club were in IASTED MIC’96 Innsbruck, in SCS ESM’96 Budapest, in Istanbul for ICAMES ‘96 (where we won the best project award), we will be soon in London for Euromedia 97......

Whoever is interested and fascinated in reproduction of reality by a computer could become member of our Club and we encourage scientists, technicians, practitioners and students to apply for membership.

The Success of ESS’96: Here the Tables

The Simulation in Industry - European Simulation Symposium & Exhibition 1996 (ESS’96) has been a very big success as attendance with very high technical/scientific level.

The Conference involved about 200 technical papers and seven workshops with people from over 40 countries all over the world (Italy 23%, UK 11%, Germany 10%, France 8%, USA 6%, Poland 5%, The Netherlands 4%, Others 34%).
The Liophant Simulation Club supported the Conference Organization and operated during the Event as logistic supports; Liophanters acquired the statistical information in each session and track, these data will be useful to evaluate the new areas of major interest for future conferences.
The Conference was divided in six different tracks presented in parallel sessions:

DIS	Distributed Interactive Simulation, VR & SE 
SB	Simulation in Business
FF	The Factory of the Future
SS	Simulation for Servirces
ME	Mission Earth
TM	Theory of Modelling & Simulation

Here we resume a simplified table related to the six tracks:

Track	S	P	A	A/P	Q	Q/S	Q/P
FF	18	51	778	15,26	101	5,61	1,98
TM	12	47	563	11,98	63	5,25	1.34
DIS	5	27	594	22,00	55	11,00	2.04
SS	7	26	414	15,95	51	7,29	1,96
ME	7	24	260	10,86	49	7,14	2.08
SB	3	17	246	14,49	16	5,33	0.94

S=Sessions | P=Papers | A=Attendance | Q=Questions 
A/P=People/Paper | Q/S= Qest / Ses.|Q/A=Qest./Paper

The track with the major attendance was FF; but the best attendance ratio has been measured on DIS and the best result in term of ratio Questions/Paper was for the ME; by the way also SB, that reaches a low result in term of questions, provided some sessions with half an hour of free discussion about advances in the area.
ESS’96 hosted a qualified exhibition including companies as Ansaldo, Blue Sky Technology, Controllab, Enea, SET, Silicon Graphics; of course also the Liophant was exhibiting in this area presenting new research projects applying simulation in harbour environments.

Therefore also the Conference social event was very spectacular and effective to rest the attendees after so busy days: the Paganini’s Violin Concert and the gala dinner on the Palazzo Ducale.
The Genoa Orchestra and the "Cannone" (Guarnieri del Gesù violin made in 1742 and played just 182 times in the last century) sound was very impressive in the Palazzo Ducale; in this environment the Science and the Art found a very fancy integration.

Liophants on Work: Project "Safety First"

The Liophant Simulation Club has developed a simulation model that reproduces, with precise details, all the procedures to manage ship operations in harbour environments to guarantee and to optimise safety by using the virtual reality. The Project "Safety First" has been sponsored by the National Association of the Pilots, Boat Men and the Tug Owners; the work has been realized by Liophant Simulation Club in cooperation with Blue Sky Technology and the Genoa University.
The virtual world created by the model reproduces a large harbour with all the various types of ships and terminals (raw materials, containers, passengers, etc.).
Each object has been modelled in detail in terms of shape, technical characteristics and operating procedures. The objects interact in the virtual world in order to reproduce all the operations.
In this environment, all harbour operations can be monitored interactively - in real-time.
Thus, it is possible to check the procedures and to control the operations from each command position/view point (i.e mooring men on shore or in boats, the pilot's point of view, decks on ships, on tugs etc.).
This approach can be used to check and control all the details involving operations to ensure the safety.
Naturally, this is also a very powerful support tool for training all the harbour services by reproducing all the possible scenarios (i.e. wind, interaction with other ships, etc).
This tool can optimise safety procedures and the package can also help identify the optimal layouts for terminals in terms of efficiency.

Best of Simulation