THE PROBLEM
Most experienced helmsmen agree that Mother Nature's temperamental ways make navigating the high seas a difficult and sometimes dangerous adventure. Thanks to the innovative combination of advanced Internet technologies and sophisticated weather prediction software, however, ship captains now have reliable tools for charting a safe course around rough waters.

One such tool is the BonVoyage System (BVS) from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Applied Weather Technology, Inc. (AWT). The need for this type of technology has intensified over the past several years as commercial shipping companies; for example, send their vessels farther into the world's oceans in search of scarce natural resources. In the oil and gas industry, the growing demand for new sources of energy is leading oil exploration ships into more remote and hostile seas. Accurate knowledge of present and future marine weather conditions not only enhances mission planning, but may one day prove to be life-saving information.

"Environmental constraints have narrowed the operational margins of many at-sea operations," says Dr. Fun Pang Chau, an AWT founder who currently heads the company's research and development efforts. "Thus, there is a need for an accurate forecasting system that can quickly capture and disseminate marine weather information to the user, whether that user is the on-board captain or a shore-based navigation specialist."

BVS is AWT's flagship product. It is a suite of software packages designed specifically to meet the weather information needs of the shipping industry. The suite is composed of three separate packages: BVS Ship Version; BVS Office Version; and BVS Web Version, the newest edition to the BVS family.

BVS Ship Version is installed on board a ship's personal computer running Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows NT. Chau describes the Ship Version as an icon-driven, graphical marine weather briefing system.

The system works like this: A ship dials into a public server bulletin board requesting weather forecasts for a specific area. That information then is downloaded and imported directly into the BVS Ship Version. By using this real-time weather data to generate color-coded graphics, the software lets users see into the heart of severe weather systems. This provides a much more complete picture of the storm than traditional, text-based weather routing systems, Chau says, because it fully captures the detailed shape of each storm system and visually displays dangerous wave-generating areas. Coupled with state-of-the-art communications technology, a 10-day weather forecast can be transmitted directly to the ship at minimal cost. With BVS Ship Version, the on-board crew now has the ability to plot a course that not only offers the greatest safety to cargo and crew, but also provides for the most economical management of the vessel by reducing fuel consumption and lessening the risk of structural damage.

Shipping company managers for shore-based fleet management and monitoring use BVS Office Version. Like its sister product, BVS Office Version is installed on Windows-based PCs. The software provides shore-based managers with color-coded weather maps overlaid with vessel positions. These maps not only display up-to-the-minute status of each ship in the fleet, but they also allow visual recognition of en route weather conditions. If nasty weather is detected along a ship's original course, the shore-based managers can work with the on-board crew to plot a new route.

"The open architecture of both BVS Ship Version and BVS Office Version means that new algorithms and features can be added as required by the user, resulting in a truly customized solution," Chau says. "In addition, the BonVoyage System can be integrated easily into other third-party software, and vice versa."

Coinciding with the widespread use of the Internet for distributed computing, Chau and his colleagues at AWT realized they needed to add a Web-based component to the BVS product family. This would give AWT customers with multiple offices a cost-effective way of accessing the same weather and fleet-location information quickly and easily. In addition, upgrades to the BVS software could be made on the Web server and then distributed easily to desktop clients at customers' offices around the world. The result was born in early 1998 and is called the BVS Web Version.

To implement the Web Version, however, AWT needed a way to bridge the gap and provide connectivity between Web servers and back-end application servers, which provide similar graphics capability as the BVS software, but in a cross-platform environment.

THE SOLUTION
After a thorough review of several commercially available solutions, Chau turned to the combination of PV-WAVE® and JWAVETM from Visual Numerics, Inc.

PV-WAVE is an array-oriented, fourth-generation programming language (4GL) used by engineers, scientists, business analysts and software developers to build and deploy visual data analysis (VDA) applications easily. These applications let users visualize and manipulate complex or extremely large technical datasets to detect and display patterns, trends, anomalies and other vital information.

The software includes hundreds of mathematical and statistical routines from the IMSL® Numerical Libraries, as well as image processing, signal processing, mapping and general data manipulation features. Because PV-WAVE's 4GL simplifies programming and does not require the tedious edit-compile-link-debug cycle required by traditional languages, users can develop fully portable applications much faster than with C/C++ or FORTRAN.

First released in 1997, JWAVE integrates the data analysis and visualization capabilities of PV-WAVE with Sun Microsystem's JavaTM programming language. The result is a product that lets developers build VDA applications written entirely in Java that are distributed and accessible over the Internet or an intranet.

JWAVE lets organizations leverage investments already made in PV-WAVE. Many organizations have written large applications for desktop visualization using PV-WAVE. With JWAVE, those PV-WAVE applications can be Web-enabled without costly rewrites. JWAVE allows PV-WAVE code to be placed on a server and then facilitates the creation of Java-based desktop clients for accessing those applications.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Visual Numerics has provided technical software solutions for numerical analysis and visualization for over 30 years. The company's software products help users understand complex data from a variety of sources and build business-critical applications. Visual Numerics offers two product lines: the IMSL® Numerical Libraries for powerful mathematical and statistical analysis and the PV-WAVE® visual data analysis development environment. Visual Numerics also offers customized consulting services for applications that involve mathematical, statistical, or visual data analysis to meet today’s business analytical needs.