An underwater buoyancy-driven glider simulator with modelling & simulation as a service architecture

This paper describes the architecture of an underwater glider simulator applying the Modelling & Simulation as a Service (MSaaS) paradigm. The simulator implements a modular and scalable service-oriented architecture where Web services are employed for the underwater glider kinematic and hydrodynamic models, for the Oceanographic models forecast data, for the glider motion control system and for the motion behaviours. The simulator itself is offered as a Web service, using a browser based GUI to present the status and result of the simulation. Two main problems are targeted: 1) the estimation of the underwater trajectory of the glider between two known (measured) surfacing points and 2) the prediction of the glider future surface position given its past history, its motion behaviour and the Oceanographic Model forecast. Considerations about the estimation of the motion of the glider when the corresponding motion control and behaviours algorithms are not disclosed are done, capitalising on the work described in a previous paper and an alternative approach to simulating the unknown behaviours, considering the hardware-in-the-loop, is discussed. The discussion also involves architectural, and technological aspects such inter-process and cross-language communication and hardware-in-the-loop interfacing. Copyright © 2017 by CAL-TEK S.r.l. All rights reserved.