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Atlantec-es Awarded Phase II SBIR to Develop Production Simulation System

Annapolis, March 2009

Atlantec Enterprise Solutions has begun work on a new NAVSEA SBIR project entitled, Automatic Assembly-Planning and Simulation. Working with its project partner the Penn State Advanced Research Laboratory, Atlantec-es is conducting research to develop a practical, affordable production simulation system for shipbuilders.

Shipbuilders can particularly benefit from production simulation by gaining valuable production knowledge and experience. Because of limited production runs, shipyards cannot gain the knowledge needed to take advantage of experience curves like their counterparts in repetitive manufacturing. Shipbuilding projects are therefore exposed to high number of uncertain cost and schedule risks.

This is particularly true, said Bryan J. Miller, President of Atlantec-es, for navy shipbuilders who build highly complex ships with particularly low production volumes. With our solution, US Navy shipyards will be able build ships digitally gaining the valuable production experience they require to significantly lower risk.

Several US shipyards have employed simulation modeling to certain facilities, but none in the US have successfully employed it on a yard wide basis because of the daunting task of modeling a shipyard.s vast facilities, extensive production processes, and huge, complex ship products. There are a couple European shipyards employing production simulation on a yard-wide basis, but even these yards have not completed simulation models after years of efforts.

Our strategy is to automate the modeling by developing knowledge based products and capturing production and process information from CAD and other legacy systems. We believe that we can reduce simulation modeling time by up to 80%, said Dr. Thomas Koch, Managing Director of Atlantec-es. In this project Atlantec-es will be able to utilize production optimization products already developed and implemented at major shipyards in Germany and Finland. The company is also working in a similar NSRP project, Large Scale Manufacturing in Shipbuilding Project, LSMS managed by NASSCO. NASSCO plans to install its initial production simulation system in December of this year.