MICruise for
Coastal Navigation

An application for calculating cruising distances

CDR Group was approached by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) for help in mapping the cruising ranges of lifeboats.

The RNLI is a charitable organisation dedicated to the saving of life at sea.  They utilise over 330 active lifeboats based at 235 lifeboat stations around the coastline of the UK and ROI.  These lifeboats can travel at speeds of 25 knots and have a range of up to 250 nautical miles.  Determining the areas that can be serviced by each lifeboat within target response times is a critical factor in the RNLI’s operations.

Calculating isochrones (lines of equal distance or time) from points on a linear coastline such as parts of Eastern England is relatively simple.  In the complex marine geography of, say, the north-west coast of Scotland the task is significantly more difficult.

Following detailed discussions with the RNLI regarding their requirements, CDR Group developed MICruise.  This is a MapBasic application running within MapInfo Professional® that rapidly calculates marine isochrones from any given coastal location or set of locations.  These isochrones can be generated as either polygons or polylines at distances selected by the operator.

MICruise is very simple to operate.  The operator is presented with a screen that allows them to specify:

• The location or locations from which isochrones are to be generated.  These can either be selected from an existing table of coastal locations or specified individual as co-ordinates in lat/long or in BNG
• The ranges for which isochrones are to be generated.  These can be selected from a pre-set list or specified individually
• Whether polygons or polylines are to be generated
• The level of precision to be used in the calculation (low values calculate faster, but may be imprecise in areas of small land masses)

A single mouse click is then all that is required to complete the calculation.

MICruise has great flexibility allowing the user to utilise any suitable vector data delineating the coastline in their area of operation.  A simple configuration file allows the user to specify the location of this data and any data regarding point locations.  The configuration files also allows the user to choose the units of measurement (nautical miles, km etc).
A single user licence costs £395.00 + VAT

Installation System Requirements

MICruise does not require any additional system requirements above the minimum set for MapInfo Professional v10.0 running Windows XP or later.  MICruise will take up less than 1MB of hard disk storage.  Various temporary files are generated as the program is run; these will increase the amount of disk space required by the program.

N.B.  MICruise requires a suitable vector data table defining the land area to be utilised.

CDR Group is a Precisely UK Partner and develops a number of MapInfo Maplets applications and bespoke utilities. For details of these and CDR’s other services, please contact the Sales Team on 01433 621282 or email sales@cdrgroup.co.uk

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