OSP Conference 2026: Experts, AI and international partners in Ålesund
On 10–11 November 2026, the Open Simulation Platform (OSP) Conference brought industry, research and academia together at the Norwegian Maritime Competence Center (NMCC) in Ålesund. The conference was organised by GCE Blue Maritime Cluster together with Norsk Katapult Digital, SINTEF Nordvest, NTNU and DNV as partner.
The power of innovation depends on bringing the experts together, in the cluster and on demanding topics, and on doing so together with our international partners. Alongside strong Norwegian representation from shipdesigners, equipment suppliers, class, research institutes and universities, this year's conference welcomed participants from Damen and from HD Hyundai, the group behind Hyundai Heavy Industries, through HD KSOE's research centres in Europe and Korea.
Several of this year's talks looked at how AI affects the way we build, verify and operate ships and maritime systems.
Highlights from the programme
Severin Sadjina of SINTEF Nordvest moderated the event. He opened with a legendary outlook on AI's permanent position, both as an enabler and as a threat to today's common understanding and established processes.
Co-simulation
Gabriel Kapellmann from Zeabuz started the programme by showing how OSP simulations can be brought into 3D and VR environments with Unity.
Kevin Koosup Yum, Managing Director of HD Hyundai's Europe R&D Center, followed by asking whether we can "vibe-model". His team let AI agents write engine models as FMUs. The simpler models were built almost without help, while the most detailed one needed a week of heavy manual input. His conclusion was that the agent takes the typing, but not the judgement, and that the specification becomes the single source of truth.
Moving on, Yong Woo Choi of HD KSOE in South Korea presented a joint study with HD Hyundai Heavy Industries and DNV on hardware-in-the-loop testing of electric propulsion. Shared requirements and a common standard for suppliers can catch integration problems before the ship is commissioned. The challenge is to get the suppliers on board at a reasonable level.
Siegfried Eisinger from DNV closed the session by showing why discrete-event simulation is needed when a simulation spans milliseconds to years, using the electrification of Hurtigruten as an example.
Digital twins
After lunch the focus moved from building models to using data. Simen Eidal from SINTEF showed, how they in the EU Project Twinship, unsupervised learning can find a vessel's operating modes in historical data, so that each mode can be described by a simpler local model.
Armin Pobitzer from VARD then took the ship designer's view. Most design choices affect both energy use and operability and he describing how system simulation is a pathway through the walls between disciplines, and between design and operation.
Participants also got a tour of the remote control centre at NTNU's Fjordlab at Ocean Campus.
Panel debate
The panel looked into how agentic AI can help increase the efficiency of the models. Severin Sadjina moderated, with Armin Pobitzer (VARD), Melih Akdağ (DNV), Professor Dong Trong Nguyen (NTNU) and Kristine Bruun Ludvigsen (SINTEF Ocean) in the panel. The morning's talks gave a concrete starting point, with AI agents already writing simple models on their own.
Abstracts
The last session gave room for four shorter project presentations, all showing how co-simulation is put to work in research. Andreas Raja Goklas Sitorus from the OptiStress project opened with AI-based stress testing, using co-simulation to search for the scenarios where a collision avoidance system fails. Magnus Steinstø from SeaCo followed with a method that lets independently developed subsystems share velocity constraints, demonstrated on a vessel with a sloshing tank.
The two last presentations came from NTNU. Professor Dong Trong Nguyen together with Rameen Sheik showed a pipeline that turns hydrodynamic models into reusable FMUs for the Marine Cybernetics lab. Zi Dou from the TWINVEST project closed the day with a wind farm digital twin built from single components up to the whole farm, validated against data from two operating farms.
Blue Maritime Hangout
After the event, around 40 of the participants joined our Blue Maritime Hangout, continouing the conversations over a slice of pizza and a beer, enjoying poster presentations, establishing new relationships and hopefully sharing ideas that will bring the world of maritime simulation further in the years to come.
Where we go from here
Zeabuz opened the conference by showing how game engines such as Unity, combined with co-simulation, give new possibilities. Models can be seen and experienced in 3D and VR, not only read as numbers. Kevin Koosup Yum added that AI agents now take much of the typing, but not the judgement, which makes the specification and the validation the most important work. VARD placed this in a wider picture, where system simulation breaks down the walls between disciplines, and between design and operation.
To get there, more players need to come on board. HD KSOE's work shows why. The platform and the models are in place, but the value depends on suppliers sharing interface information and agreeing on a common standard.
These pain points were the starting point for the workshop on day two. The groups discussed what is needed to use more AI in co-simulation and digital twins, and ended up with five headings for possible projects:
AI-assisted modelling
How to deal with reverse engineering and security issues
AI-assisted simulation, tuning and validation
Tools for enabling FMUs for training and validation
Best practices with OSP
GCE Blue Maritime Cluster will follow these up with the partners in the coming year.
Looking outward to stay ahead
AI is changing the rules of the game. But if we want to be world leading in advanced maritime operations, the digital picture and simulation will be an important part of it. This year's talks covered ship design, commissioning, operations and offshore wind.
The expertise in our cluster is unique. Shipyards, equipment suppliers, class, research institutes and universities sit close together and know each other's challenges. But to hold that position, we must also look outward, collaborate and keep pushing things forward. This year HD Hyundai and Damen took part and shared their own work and challenges with the Norwegian community.
This year's conference was sponsored by the Research Council of Norway. We thank them for their support. We also thank all speakers, panellists, co-organisers and participants.
We look forward to seeing you at OSP Conference 2027.
Open Simulation Platform (OSP): From joint industry project to open community
OSP started in 2018 as a two-year joint industry project. DNV, Rolls-Royce Marine (now Kongsberg Maritime), SINTEF and NTNU founded it, and about twenty partners took part. The goal was to let models from different suppliers and tools run together in one simulation of a whole ship, without anyone having to give away their intellectual property.
The solution was co-simulation built on the open Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) standard. Each model is delivered as a black box (an FMU) and connected to the others through standardised interfaces. When the project closed in 2020, the results were released as open source: the co-simulation library libcosim, reference models, demo applications and the OSP Interface Specification (OSP-IS), an emerging standard for describing maritime equipment and system models.
Since then OSP has lived on as an open industry community.
