Cranes Today Magazine Cover Story: Simulator Training

Airline pilots have benefited from the use of simulators for many years. More recently, though, this virtual technology has been applied in other environments, where training in the real world is either too expensive or fraught with risk. In the crane sector, the use of simulators has focused on maritime applications, mainly because of the difficulties involved in training in offshore and dockside cranes.

But other areas of the crane industry have been slower to adopt simulator training. A crawler crane or tower crane, for example, can be rigged in a yard and used comparatively safely for operator training. It follows then that few owners or users of mobile cranes can justify spending the sort of money on a simulator that a port authority or a major operator training institute can afford.

“Today, most crane simulators are turnkey products sold to the marine industry where the costs of cranes are so high, and where operator productivity is so important”, says Paul Freedman, President of the Canadian firm Simlog, a relative newcomer to the sector. Founded in 1999, Montreal-based Simlog has its roots in the forestry industry, but it has recently turned its attention to the crane industry.

“Here at Simlog, we are working in a brand new, and very different, corner of the crane industry, with products costing orders of magnitude less than marine crane simulators, and designed for set-up on the customer’s PC”, says Freedman.

Paul Freedman agrees that the land-based market is quite different to the maritime one – there are far more potential customers for a start. He is aiming at crane rental firms, crane users, consultants, and training firms, and he is pricing his product accordingly. Freedman says he knows of no other crane simulators currently targeting his market – not to mention selling at his price.

For USD$2500, you can buy the Simlog Mobile Crane Personal Simulator, a CD-ROM which will run on your desktop PC requiring only the addition of a couple of standard off-the-shelf joysticks. It is not the same true-to-life mock-up environment offered by the likes of the turnkey simulator suppliers, but that does not matter, Freedman argues.

“We believe that almost all of the simulation’s value is in the software sophistication. That is, the kinds of tasks to be performed, the ways in which task execution is measured, and how the tasks are organized”, he says. Panoramic 360 degree displays are fine, but not necessary, Freedman believes. “You can only look one way at a time and with our system, you can select different views with a joystick button.”

“We are far ahead of what the other simulator companies are doing, who continue to concentrate on building crane “replicators” – the crane does X, so the simulator does X – instead of building tools to help train new operators and tools to evaluate and improve the skills of existing operators”.
Freedman believes that the adoption of the CCO operator certification programme in the USA will stimulate demand for the Simlog system. “The CCO practical exam component was designed to evaluate the generic skills required to operate most any crane and that’s why the practical exam tasks, for example, serve as generic tasks for Simlog to build our simulated tasks around.