Research on marine structure inspection support system on mobile device platform

Ship and offshore structure often work in very severe environment. Therefore routine inspection and maintenance are essential to keep ship structure and equipment in good state, and can decrease the possibility of sea pollution and safety problems. Besides that, the activity of inspection and maintenance is also directly connected with cost control and condition assessment. Current inspection is still mainly based on paper and pen, so it is rather time-consuming for transferring inspection data from paper to computer system, and more difficult to make calculation based on the inspection records. In this paper, the concept of information integration model and inspection support system using mobile device is introduced. The structuralized data in the information integration model offer much convenience to data transferring. The inspection support system consists of one headquarter management subsystem and one inspector handling subsystem. A mechanism of data exchange between the two subsystems is developed based on standard inspection workflow. The headquarter subsystem works on computer, and the inspector subsystem is mobile application instead of paper and pen. Versatile tests and platform experiments are carried out to demonstrate and confirm the feasibility and validity.