Reengineering the Naval Ship Concept Design Process

Naval ship concept design is very much an “ad hoc” process. Selection of design concepts for assessment is guided primarily by experie nce, design lanes, rules-of-thumb, preference and imagination. Objective attributes are not adequately synthesized or presented to support efficient and effective decisions. Attributes are often qualitative, inconsistent, and not provided to design engineers in a format they can use. The design space is very large, non-linear, discontinuous, and bounded by a variety of co nstraints and thresholds. These problems make a structured search of design space difficult. Without a structured search, there is no rational way to measure the optimality of selected concepts relative to the millions of other concepts that have not been considered or assessed. Responsible decisions cannot be made without this information and perspective. This paper addresses these problems in the context of a systems approach to naval ship concept design. Multiattribute value theory (MAVT) and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) are used to synthesize an effectiveness function. A Pareto Genetic Algorithm (PGA) searches design parameter space and identifies non-dominated design concepts in terms of cost and effectiveness. Design concepts are presented graphically as points on a nondominated cost-effectiveness frontier for consideration by dec ision-makers. A simplified surfacecombatant design demonstrates the process.