When the ship is at sea, it may be regarded as an independent isolated system that can only rely on
its own means to maintain safety in what can be an extremely adverse environment, such as the ocean.
In most of the cases, when accidents occur with consequent flooding of compartments, salvage is not
possible within the next hours. Therefore, it is very important to keep stability as intact as possible to
allow enough time for external help to arrive, or at least to evacuate the ship in the best possible safety
conditions.
Decision-support systems for such situations, must anticipate the status of the ship in advance. This
can be done through time-scaled simulations in real-time. Within this scope, the scale results in a fastforward
simulation, which implies that the time required to compute one simulation step, is smaller
than the simulation time -step. As the increase of the simulation time -step normally decreases the
accuracy of the results (which is not acceptable for this case), the solution to achieve reliable results is
to reduce the calculation time through intensive and, most often, distributed computation.