Once the user has successfully created the activities that they wish to include in their feasibility calculations, they will need to navigate to the "Planner" module to create a plan/sequence of activities. Each activity that is added to the plan will have the feasibility automatically calculated.

The planning page is accessible by clicking on the planning button as shown in the figure below:

Click "Add Step" or the pencil icon in the list to add or edit steps. Choose an activity from the drop down and configure the step.

Note: you can build several sequence steps from the same "Activity". The sequence step can be differentiated by vessel heading, activity start times and duration.

Users can build linked sequence steps by using the predecessor feature. If for example sequence step "Activity 2" starts at the end of "Activity 1", "Activity 1" can be selected as predecessor to "Activity 2". Users can add as many linked sequence steps as they desire. Linked sequence steps will inherit their start times based on the calculated end time from the preceding sequence step.

Once the start time has been defined, either by manual input or through the preceding step, duration and contingency times need to be entered.

Total Duration is automatically calculated as the sum of Duration and Contingency.

Note: Duration and Contingency times are used in Alpha Factor calculation. See supporting article here

If the vessel is navigating a curve, multiple steps with in incremental headings must be created. This is now easily done by clicking the "Add curve" button upon creating a new step.

The user must input the following information:

Activity: The activity to be used through the whole curve

Predecessor: The prior activity to the curve (optional, predecessor can be "None")

Start date and time: The start date and time of the first curve segment (Automatically if a predecessor is selected)

Duration and contingency: The total duration/contingency across all curve segments.

Start heading: The heading the vessel is coming from into the curve (Automatically if a predecessor is selected)

End heading: The heading the vessel is continuing once the curve is completed

Segments: The number of steps to be created.

If the curve has a predecessor defined, the start heading and time will automatically be set to the same heading and time as the predecessor.

Each curve segment will have the same duration/contingency, and will be calculated as the total duration/contingency divided by the number of segments.

The curve will always be created as the shortest between the start and end heading. This means that a curve with a start heading towards north and end heading towards west will move counter clockwise.

A vessel is completing a normal lay operation at 180 degrees and continuing towards 120 degrees. The curve should consist of 3 segments which takes 6 hours to complete.

In the below drawing, the pink arrows represents the segments the vessel is coming from and moving into. The blue arrows represents the curve segments.

First the "normal lay" activity at 180 degrees must be created in ODST.

Afterwards the curve is created as:

Then the final "Normal lay" at 120 degrees is added.

The resulting sequence is as following, where the marked section includes the three curve steps.

You can organize your sequence steps by grouping multiple steps together.

Grouping is done by selecting the relevant steps, then click on the "Group" icon.

Enter your unique group name. If an existing group name is selected, the steps are added to the existing group.

When a group is created, you can visualize the accumulated operational status of the group.

Additional group actions include:

The following video gives an introduction on how to use the grouping functionality:

You can build multiple plans in parallel. This feature is especially helpful if you want to test multiple sequence scenarios such as rescheduling or changing the vessel heading.

You create a new plan by clicking the "New draft" button.

You can create 5 plans, 1 active and 4 drafts.

The plans can have status "Active" or "Drafts", but only one plan can (and must) be "active" at a time. This is the plan that will be shown by default when opening ODST, and the plan that defines the operational status bar on the "Overview"/"Home" page.

If a "Draft" plan is set to "Active", the current "Active" plan will automatically be set to "Draft".

You can duplicate an existing plan. The new plan will automatically be set to "Draft".

You can also change the name of an existing plan. However, plan names must be unique.

Lastly you can delete all draft plans. The active plan is not allowed to delete.