Costa Concordia: Modeling ships using FORTRAN in EXCEL? REALLY!
The tragedy of the Costa Concordia really got me to thinking about models and simulations. Sadly, even the best model or simulation cannot overcome the exceptional case like a captain that may have decided to override systems to prevent errors. Of course we don’t know if that is the case, the Captain’s decisions will be inspected in courts and PhD programs for years to come. Can you get into the process?
See an earlier blog for earlier remarks
Costa Concordia: Control System Synthesis using a submarine as a model
Let’s say you are an expert on C, C++, or C# and you are motivated by your boss to build an app that uses a FORTRAN library. Why would this happen to you? Well you could be working on older aerospace products, and have to use software generated against devices that would be expensive to re-test to prove that your simulation is valid (it would never be exactly the same as the device or vehicle). Then you would need to download the xll files from
Once you work through the example code, you then would need the ability to use LAPACK, then you would download that from:
For the CHM files you will need to choose properties and unblock the file (the type of file will be CHM, but this is the same for zip and chm files):
