Powerful, flexible and cost-effective analyses of maritime systems can be conducted in an appropriate way with distributed simulations. Co-simulation components require interoperability like specified by the IEC TC/65/290/DC to insure information exchange and synchronization. Therefore this paper describes a way to insure the interoperability of co-simulations of maritime systems. User-and technical requirements for these co-simulations are derived to create a deeper understanding for especially the necessity of a common semantic model. Furthermore, six integration layers are presented for co-simulation-based analysis. They are derived from IEC TC/65/290/DC and the conceptual architecture approach for co-simulation systems. The paper introduces a semantic model approach to reflect the requirements formal description of the simulation model, observability, controllability and interoperability. The model is used to configure the inter-process communication of the used co-simulation architecture. This is done by an automatic model transformation from the semantic model to the platform specific implementation.

For simulation based verification and validation (V&V) of maritime system designs, the system under analysis is exposed to a variety of traffic scenarios. Usually bridge and shipping simulators do not provide intelligent behavior for the simulated ships. Instead, they use simple route following techniques, or just follow a given direction. In automated V&V scenarios, a lot of different simulation runs must be executed e.g. to test new assistance systems in various situations. To cover the needed number of important situations, an automated behavior of target ships is needed. This paper presents a technique to configure and calculate realistic and intelligent ship behavior. Each ship has its own knowledge about the environment and uses this knowledge to decide what kind of behavior the ship shows using the Behavior Tree technique.