Intelligent Assistant for Ship Design

Based on the January 2025 report of the Congressional Budget Office on the Navy’s 2025 shipbuilding plan, the Navy plans to purchase 364 new ships over 30 years, including 293 combat ships and 71 combat logistics and support ships.  The plan would result in fewer aircraft carriers and large surface combatants, but more attack submarines, small surface combatants and support ships. The composition of assets aims to expand the fleet by 2054 to 390 battle force ships with distributed firepower. The Navy also aims to incorporate a large number unmanned surface and undersea vessels in the fleet.   The hull form and the hull structure of autonomous vessels differ from the hull of manned ships since several performance requirements are different.  Autonomous vessels require better stability to prevent broaching in order for the ship to exhibit predictable performance in various sea conditions.  At the same time the vessel can be stiff in roll.  In terms of efficiency, the mission profile of an unmanned ship is different compared to the mission profile of a manned ship due to their different functionalities.  The maneuvering performance of unmanned ships requires high directional stability characteristics.  This is crucial for autonomous navigation, ensuring that the vessel stays on course without manual correction.  The volume requirements are different because the reliability expectations are significantly higher since there are no humans on board.  This leads to high redundancy of systems that requires a high volume for multiple reserve machinery and electronics components. Finally, autonomous vessels require additional strength in certain parts of the hull since they may encounter floating debris undetected by their sensors.  Both the hull form and its structural configuration impact the manufacturing cost. An Intelligent Assistant for Ship Design (IASD) will be developed.  It will enable ship designers to rapidly identify Pareto front designs or near Pareto designs that can lead to breakthroughs if further development is needed. One unique component of IASD is the incorporation of producibility, which is not adequately addressed in current naval early-stage design tools.  It is well known that the best practice in early-stage preliminary design is for the integrated product team (IPT) to focus on optimizing production while meeting all requirements. Variable fidelity CFD simulations will be used for constructing multi-fidelity regression models for expediting the design process.     CREATE-Ships is a design software development project performed by NSWC/Carderock in collaboration with the Navy’s technical authorities in NAVSEA and under sponsorship of DoD.  It comprises a close to 20 years, multi-Million dollar investment. The proposed effort will create new capabilities for ship design and integrate them with LEAPS and with simulation and design tools developed under the high value investments of the CREATE-Ships program.