CONCURRENT MARINE DESIGN

The approach or paradigm utilized in design of marine vehicles and systems is rapidly changing from series, functional design to concurrent engineering utilizing integrated product/process development teams. In this concurrent marine design approach, a much greater effort is made to fully consider the performance, manufacture, and life-cycle support of the design in parallel very early in design. At this point in the design process, there is the greatest leverage for build time and life-cycle cost improvements. To be fully effective, this approach has to be supported by an integrated, three-dimensional computer product model.

Curved Block Assembly Line

As in other industries, much of this design work is now being conducted in cross-functional integrated product development teams. This requires that effective engineers now have a much higher level of team and team leadership skills.

Within this area, faculty and graduate students of the department are participating in a number of national efforts to develop the analysis thods, design computer environment, and information system infrastructure to support this approach to future ship design and manufacture. The department, in conjunction with the Marine Systems Division of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI-MSD), is one of the partners with Intergraph Federal Systems, Newport News Shipbuilding, and the American Bureau of Shipping in COMPASS: Commercial Object Model of Product/Process for an Advanced Shipbuilding System sponsored by DARPA MARITECH. The team is also providing domain expertise and support for STEP Ship Model Database and Translators for Data Exchange, which is developing ship product model standards under DARPA MARITECH support.

Outfitted Stern Construction

Specific work involves the development of advanced preliminary design tools, including the prototyping of distributed smart objects to support ship design analyses and simulated-based design. This work is focused on developing an advanced Windows-based ship design environment. The use of intelligent agents for preliminary ship design is also being investigated in cooperation with researchers from the independent, not-for-profit Industrial Technology Institute, located adjacent to the North Campus. Work is also underway to develop an improved finite element method approach for predicting the macroscale dimensional and shape effects of welding fabrication of ship structural blocks.

Ship production research is also supported directly through the department's NAVSEA Professor of Ship Production Science Program. Recent NAVSEA Professor sponsored ship production research by graduate students includes developing a PC-based glossary, design symbol database and a ship design characteristic database; performing a comparison of past and current manual and computer-based design; research into engine room equipment spatial relationships; development of a computer-based shipbuilding policy developer for use by U.S. shipyards and NAVSEA; and updating an existing ship design program for fleet and single ship preliminary design development to make it user-friendly with graphical output of the results for better understanding of the impact of the various design parameters on cost.

The department, through its association with UMTRI-MSD, provides opportunities for graduate students to participate in ship production research. Recent projects at UMTRI-MSD, in which graduate students have participated, include the design of a production facility to build the sterns of ships; evaluation of the CAD/CAM systems used by world-class shipbuilders; devel-opment and maintenance of a compendium of standards for U.S. shipbuilding; and exploring and implementing infrastructure technologies to move the industry toward an integrated product and process development (IPPD) environment.

FACULTY: Bongiorni, Lamb, Parsons, Perakis, Spicknall, Vlahopoulos