The application of the design building block approach to innovative ship design

The ship design process is complex and strongly influenced by both the inherent technical complexity and interactions of subsystems. These arise from within ships and from external influences, such as the design environment and the capabilities provided by the available tools. These difficulties are particularly found in the design of service vessels, such as warships. Both requirements and performance of the ship are multi-faceted and some aspects may not be readily amenable to numerical description and assessment, particularly in the eady stages of the design process. Preliminary ship design is characterised by exploration of options and the investigation of design drivers and relationships, with great variability in the design definition adopted by designers. This provides significant potential for investigation of alternative and innovative design solutions. A wide range of broad approaches and detail procedures for the application of computers to preliminary ship design have been proposed, including an architecturally centred approach to preliminary ship design. The latter has been previously proposed as a method for the integration of the technical and stylistic aspects. The most recent implementation of the Design Building Block approach is as a module within the PARAMARINE ship design software, known as SURFCON. This research commenced with evaluating and demonstrating this implementation fit for use in preliminary ship design by modelling of a conventional vessel. A detailed procedure for using the tool was developed and this procedure was demonstrated by the development of a similar design. The Design Building Block approach was subsequently applied to a range of innovative preliminary ship design studies. These covered a range of vessel types and also differed in their overall objectives, including the assessment of the feasibility of a new concept and the evaluation of the impact of specific capabilities on the overall ship design. The research confirmed that the use of the integrated spatial and numerical model, with an interactive graphical display, increased transparency in modelling and analysis, while greatly enhancing the designer's understanding of the design drivers. The flexibility and relative ease with which major features of the design could be modified, encouraged the exploration of alternatives and led to a ship design process akin to the sketching processes in product and architectural design. Further research is proposed in the areas of interface design to support innovate design, incorporation of further simulation and numerical approaches, together with the integration of systems engineering aspects into innovative preliminary ship design.