How to increase ship design productivity with a simulation-driven approach

The marine industry is under continuous pressure to improve vessel efficiency and reduce emissions. The only way to comply with new environmental regulations is to design the most efficient ship possible. The greatest impact on increasing vessel efficiency and reducing manufacturing and operating costs can be made during the ship design phase.

In this white paper, we demonstrate how ship design productivity can be increased with a simulation-driven ship design process. This new approach relies on the digital technologies available today to break down the data and collaboration silos in the ship design spiral. Naval architects can evaluate many more designs and focus on improvements or novel solutions to find the most efficient design.

Control the ship design spiral with an integrated ship design and engineering approach

The traditional ship design process typically starts with a mission statement for the new ship. The process then looks at different aspects of the design in turn, such as proportions, hull form, general arrangement, structure, ship weight, etc. Often these evaluation stages are performed by separate teams with no link between the tools they use or the data produced. Any changes in requirement or ship design requires all aspects to be re-examined, but because of the delay in data transfer, detailed analyses often lag behind the current design. This process increases pressure on profit margins and reduces the time available to create the best possible design.

The simulation-driven ship design process outlined in this paper uses connected tools and centralized data storage to remove silos and connect all analysis stages to one central master model. Teams have access to the required data and can always work on the current design. This enables faster design updates and integrated analyses.

Reduce costs and design time by optimizing your ship design process

Our solutions provide an integrated design environment, automated workflows and intelligent design exploration tools. Working in this way increases ship design productivity by streamlining the process. This enables rapid analysis of many design variants and increased understanding of ship performance from the earliest design stages. The reduction in manual intervention frees up naval architects to focus on results analysis and design alterations.