KDI’s International Simulation User
Conference 2019 - A Voyage of Discovery!
A Voyage of Discovery
Kongsberg Digital’s annual Simulation
User Conference (UC) took place in
Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Septem-ber
25-26. The conference gathered
close to 200 delegates from all over
the world and was located on board the
unique and historic ocean liner SS Rot-terdam.
The ship was built in 1953 for
the Holland America Line and is ideal
for our “Voyage of Discovery”, which
was the theme for this year’s event.
Launching K-Sim Connect
The aim of the UC is to facilitate the
sharing of ideas in order to enhance
the collective knowledge of the inter-national
simulation community. High-lighting
increased safety, sustainability
and digitalization initiatives in the mari-time
industry requires new perspec-tives,
training tools and methods for
the training providers. Kongsberg Digi-tal’s
Tone-Merete Hansen addressed
this in her opening speech, which was
followed by several product news pre-sentations
and the launch of K-Sim
Connect, a brand new digital platform
providing cloud-based services to
KONGSBERG’s maritime simulation
community.
Built on the vision of creating an eco-system
for maritime training, K-Sim
Connect will enable a wide range of
possibilities within simulation products
and services, connectivity and coop-eration
among users including new
business opportunities benefitting not
only the single simulation user, but the
entire maritime training community.
The maritime simulation community
Kongsberg Digital is in the process of
developing the portal and encourages
the instructors to join and start using
it for distributing exercises to students,
allowing them to train outside school
hours - anytime and anywhere. In ad-dition,
instructors can benefit from be-ing
the first to receive simulation news
and invitations and to get an overview
of which models and exercise areas are
currently available. Soon, it will be pos-sible
to purchase
and download all of
these (including spare parts) through
the portal, making it easier for instruc-tors
to quickly get access to what fits
with the curriculum.
A few customers have already started
using the system and one of these is
Mr. Sjoerd Notting, lecturer at the
Amsterdam University of Applied Sci-ences.
“It is far more convenient for
the student to use the anywhere and
anytime training solution in K-Sim Con-nect
PAGE 6 THE MARITIME SIMULATION NEWSLETTER | DECEMBER 2019
than waiting for access to the
K-Sim Engine desktop system at the
school,” he said when sharing his ex-perience
from the stage. Tone-Merete
Hansen, Senior Vice President, Kongs-berg
Digital, is confident that this is the
way forward, and commented: “We are
the facilitators of the platform, but we
need to further develop K-Sim Con-nect
together with you, our custom-ers,
in order to include the right type
of services for the maritime simulation
community”.
Additional K-Sim Connect development
plans include connecting simulation
us-ers
and simulators for collaboration
and
co-training purposes, as well as facili-tating
subscription modules for simu-lation
models, features and exercises
which will be part of the ecosystem.
All of this will provide invaluable education
and training benefits for students,
instructors, institutions and, ultimately,
the entire maritime industry.
Product news and updates
The conference program featured
several K-Sim product presentations
where delegates could dive into top-ics
of particular interest. K-Sim En-gine
Product Managers presented the
COMMUNITY NEWS
BY: ANNE VOITH, MARKETING MANAGER, MARITIME SIMULATION, KONGSBERG DIGITAL