IMAM 2017

Refactoring Early Ship Design Methodologies

ABSTRACT

Within the SHIPLYS project, one of the key goals is to increase the efficiency, speed and reliability of early design processes. Over many decades, a wealth of different methodological approaches have been conceived and applied. Such methodologies to a large extent rely explicitly or implicitly on the then-current computational capabilities and the set of objectives to be accomplished. With new or more powerful computing and processing techniques continuously becoming available, streamlining or refactoring of such methodologies appears to be a useful exercise in order to take best advantage and to accomplish the project’s goals.

It seems appealing to accelerate and improve such design processes by increasing the degree of automation. However, as with most creative tasks it is of high importance to enable design engineers to stay in full control of such improved processes. Process improvements must not take away the possibility to apply expert knowledge and experience to drive design decisions.

In order to satisfy these requirements, a review of existing design process models for ship design has been carried out in an attempt to produce an up-to-date formal model representation of such models. Based on this study an ship lifecycle process model (with particular focus on early design) has been established to create the foundation of various design support and design management functions with the intention to support design engineers in various design stages.
We provide an outline of the resulting model and how it was created, reviewed and refined using a graphical modeling environment from a collection of pre-existing design process descriptions and methodologies. During this work, some re-factoring of design flows and activities was performed as a part of the formal analysis of the model.