Strachan & Henshaw, (S&H) one of the country’s leading engineering solutions providers for the Defence and Nuclear industries, has selected AutoMod from AutoLogic Systems Ltd as its best fit process modelling solution for the MOD’s Future Carrier project.

Strachan & Henshaw is a key partner in the BAE Systems design for two new aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy, scheduled to be in service in 2012 and 2015. The project is awesome in size, with an overall budget of approximately £7 billion. Each carrier will have a displacement of around 60,000 tonnes and a crew of upto 1400 personnel. Strachan & Henshaw’s role is to design the munitions stowage, preparation, handling and management throughout the ship.

The company is already making use of the simulation software on several important areas of the Future Carrier project and also for other projects, including waste handling solutions for naval vessels and the decommissioning of both the Dungeness and Hunterston nuclear plants.

“Although S&H has always specialised in the movement of high integrity materials, the Future Carrier project demanded a much higher level of graphical simulation than we had previously utilised. “ states Senior Systems Engineer, Dan Oakley, who is responsible for overall systems integration for this vital project. “We undertook an extensive survey of the simulation market to identify the systems that appeared to offer the functionality we required. A more detailed evaluation reduced this to just two possible solutions, one of which was AutoMod. We then installed pilot versions of the two final contenders during a stringent five month live test period.”

“Flexibility was a key consideration as every project at S&H is unique, every model has to be developed from scratch.” Continues Dan Oakley. “Most simulation packages rely on utilising existing models when generating new ones; this was not good enough for us. The strength of AutoMod is its flexibility which allows entirely new models can be built from scratch quickly and accurately. The quality of the graphics is impressive, as is the depth of analysis available.

It also offers an emulation capability; this will be a huge benefit in testing the integration between the various control systems involved in a project of this complexity. At the end of the evaluation the result was a unanimous agreement that AutoMod combined the widest functionality with the most flexibility and provided by far the best support and service. We had no hesitation in awarding AutoLogic Systems the contract.”

Ten of S&H’s engineers have so far been trained to use AutoMod of whom six are already working on building the initial models for the Future Carriers project, with much valued consultancy support from Harvey Craig, Senior Consultant at AutoLogic Systems. “The number of items being controlled at any one time will be in excess of 10,000. Aircraft carriers by their nature must be equipped for maintenance and repair as well as optimum levels of deployment.” continues Dan Oakley. “ Each and every item of munitions must be monitored, even the empty packaging is valuable for maximising storage space and analysis of weapons usage. Every box or package must be routed and stored correctly.”

“ Naturally, the movement of weapons during deployment situations is critical and every possible scenario must be tested and analysed. The systems we design must deliver optimum efficiency not only when the carriers first go into service, but throughout their service life. This could be anything up to thirty years. So the simulation must be able to model and test every possible condition and variable that present knowledge can conceive. We are confident the AutoMod software can do just that. AutoMod will deliver significant reductions in design and test times along with the associated cost savings. We will also gain greater confidence in the resulting designs, both within the S&H team and with our project partners. S&H has long embraced Business Excellence principals and AutoMod will certainly play its part in maintaining and enhancing our excellent standards of performance, in the short and long term future.”

Graham Carter, Joint Managing Director of AutoLogic Systems is very pleased to announce this new business, “It is hugely gratifying after such an extensive review of our company’s capabilities, to be selected for such a high–profile project where the power and integrity of the simulation software is of the utmost importance. The Future Carrier project is an exciting challenge for all the companies involved and we at AutoLogic are delighted that Strachan & Henshaw has chosen to include us in such an impressive team.”