Rolls-Royce Marine and Integrated Control Design AS (ICD) of Ålesund, Norway, has entered into a new three-year agreement. The agreement includes use of the computer middleware CDP as well as project work and software specific support.

Industrial Control Design is a small technology company with offices at Ålesund Kunnskapspark. It is a member of the Norwegian Center of Expertise-Maritime. This North-Western part of Norway is seeing rapid growth within development of advanced electronics- and computer based control systems.

Rolls-Royce Marine has chosen CDP as an integral part of its Common Control platform. Rolls-Royce puts emphasis on standardising the use of software and hardware. The Marine branch has progressed far in this aspect, putting emphasis on choosing components and sub-contractors that display stability, are robust and give fast response when called upon.

"Without CDP, development of our systems would extract a heavier toll on internal resources," according to Rune Volden, technical products manager of Rolls-Royce Marine. "ICD has been very welcoming in the situations where we have needed assistance for development of complex systems. We have chosen the CDP software and ICD as our provider due to their product and service-minded attitude."

Rolls-Royce Marine purchase manager John Arne Hagen adds: It is important for us that ICD continues progressing, also in other markets than the one we belong to locally. We depend on the competence and knowledge being built within ICD, and on the company having a foundation that facilitates continued co-operation and development in the years to come.

Rolls-Royce today uses CDP in maritime applications, winch and crane control, dynamic positioning and other critical processes aboard offshore boats.

The products have built-in redundancy and a simple method for removing and adding components in a running system. Because of this, ICDs solutions have been preferred for Rolls-Royce's most critical systems.

Large, critical systems require thorough testing. This is where CDP excels with excellent facilitation for HIL (Hardware-In-the-Loop) testing, where you can replace an existing component with a computer generated signal. In this way, procedures and processes can be tested with the system running, without the risk of endangering equipment or personnel. CDP is an integrated tool for development, programming, testing and maintenance of advanced control systems. As the only one of its kind, this tool has everything that is needed in this type of development process.

ICDs customers come from the international area, making international recruitment crucial.

ICD is currently looking for qualified personnel throughout the EU. This is to ensure that all customers have access to well qualified support personnel, and also to ensure that demand for system design services is met.

ICD has recently committed to a partnership agreement with Trolltech. Trolltech, which was recently bought by Nokia, creates programming tools that can be used to supplement CDP. This makes it easier for customers such as Rolls-Royce to develop user interfaces that are customised for individual customers.

This type of development and co-operation, alongside specialists in their field, is very important to our business, according to Rune Volden at Rolls-Royce.