How to calculate the the water attack power a liner bears? How to optimize design according to the difference in ship hull force site? These can be solved by COMPASS-WALCS software system developped by the underwater operating equipment team of "deep ocean engineering and high-tech ship collaborative innovation center" and the collaborative innovation team built by Prof. Ren Huilong of HEU and China classification society. Recently, the basic module of the software system was formally issued to the industry, indicating that China has a floating body wave load calculation commercial software which has a completely independent intellectual property rights. This filled the domestic blank.

The reasonable confirmation of a computational load of ship and ocean engineering structures in design is the premise and key to its structure design and strength assessment. The main function of COMPASS-WALCS software system is to solve the problem of ship and offshore floating structure elastic effect and the coupling effect of the flow field, speed effect, slamming strong nonlinear effect and coupling problem of offshore platform and flexible components, thus giving wave load response on the ship hull or offshore platform.

The software system consists of the basic module of the ship and ocean engineering 3D wave loads calculation, linear hydroelastic analysis module, nonlinear hydroelastic analysis module, calculation module of the movement of ship in motion and load as well as the analysis module of the coupling between floating platform and the flexible attachment components. With the popularization and application of the software system and the start of technical service, the history of relying on foreign commercial software in wave loads calculation of ship and ocean engineering will be changed, which is helpful to reduce the design cost, and to provide technical support for independent research and development of new ship type and offshore platform.

According to Professor Ren Huilong who is in charge of this project, Harbin Engineering University three-dimensional wave loads calculation software development started in 1998. In the past decade, they made a number of research achievements and accumulated a lot of calculation software module which can be used in practical engineering. However, they don’t have the right channel to do commercial promotion. In 2013, taking the establishment of the "ocean engineering and high-tech ship collaborative innovation center" as an opportunity, the leading unit Harbin Engineering University together with China Classification Society launched the joint development and commercial operation of the COMPASS-WALCS software, and therefore a collaborative innovation cooperation mode was set up, in which the Chinese classification society proposes industry demand, Harbin Engineering University is responsible for the research and development, upgrade and maintenance of software core technologies, then the Chinese classification society is in charge of software certification and commercial promotion.

Now the software has been used by a number of units such as R & D department and review department of the Chinese classification society, the 701 research institution of China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, CSIC Ship Design & Research Center Co Ltd, Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Co. Ltd, the 708 research institution of China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding Co., Shanghai Jiao Tong University, etc. It has good prospects in the future.