Høglund designs, engineers, delivers and supports advanced integrated power and energy solutions for the shipping industry by utilizing state of the art automation and control systems
Long-time mariners, brand new technology
Høglund is an industry leader in ship automation, powering hundreds of large vessels around the world. The company has been in the marine automation business since 1993 and after a long stretch of time in service, the system was ripe for modernization. Relying on Høglund’s deep knowledge of the current system, its bottlenecks and opportunities, our task is to help improve, modernize and explore possibilities through new technology.
How do we help Høglund to succeed with its mission to stay relevant?
Marine automation systems are extremely complex, managing everything onboard the vessel from engines to navigation and security. Building these kinds of systems involves multiple parties; the shipyards building vessels, the crew and the teams of engineers that design, test and install the systems onboard. In collaboration with Høglund we managed to modernize their suite of tools, streamlining work and enabling new possibilities going forward.
Modernizing an entire suite of tools for marine vessels
Crafting a language for building components
For vessel use, we created a high-performance application that surfaces the complete live automation system, used as a status dashboard by the crew. Teams on land can also view the dashboard remotely to keep track of the vessel’s operations. Adapting the dashboard for multiple systems we created both a native Windows and a cloud application.
A system's visualization engine
Crafting a language for building components
Further for systems with legacy
Using our domain knowledge from graphics programming and language design, we created a domain specific markup language that made it easy to form new interactive and reusable components for building out automation systems.
The OSDesigner, a design tool for automation systems
Visually design HMIs for automation systems
OSDesigner is an Høglund app where engineers can put together systems visually. We rebuilt and modernized OSDesigner, adding new features to track pace of the rapid development of automation systems. The new tool lets the user pull in components to build visually, giving them a good overview of the complete system.