The objective of the proposed CoE is to establish new fundamental and physical insight into the behaviour of ships and ocean structures with due consideration of the random nature of the ocean environment and the possibilities of the automatic control of vehicles and facilities by developing:

• new hydrodynamic models for strongly nonlinear free surface-body interaction considering green water loading, water impact, sloshing in 3D containers, run-up on platform legs, finite amplitude wave-induced motions and structural loads.
• new nonlinear controller designs for ships and ocean structures based on a tight integration of control theory, hydrodynamics and structural mechanics.
• new methods for predicting hydrodynamic loads and their single or multiple extreme and cyclic effects on ships and ocean structures considering their stochastic and nonlinear character, taking due account of the effect of automatic control and human intervention, as well as possible hydroelastic effects.