This paper presents an object-oriented modeling (OOM) approach to model development of marine operation systems, specifically the hydraulic systems of marine cranes. Benefited from the rapid development of computation technology, many modeling and simulation techniques and software tools have proved to be very useful during the product and system development process. However, due to the increasing complexity of the physical systems, many challenges still exist regarding model flexibility, model integration, simulation accuracy, stability, and efficiency. The goal of introducing OOM to complex dynamic systems is to provide flexible, effective, and efficient models for different simulation applications. Previous work presented a virtual prototyping (VP) framework based on the functional mock-up interface (FMI) standard. The advantage of using FMI co-simulation is that modeling and simulation of stiff and strongly coupled systems can be distributed. As a result, the modeling tradeoffs between simulation accuracy and efficiency can be evaluated. The essential features of OOM and its application within dynamic operation system domain are highlighted through a case study. These features include model causality, model encapsulation, and inheritance that facilitate the decomposition and coupling of complex system models for co-simulation. The simulation results based on the proposed VP framework showed speedups in the computation efficiency at the cost of moderate accuracy loss.