Integration Software Tool for Multidisciplinary Design of Ships

Ship engineering is an iterative process requiring interaction among different disciplines involved in the design at the various stages of the design cycle from the early concept to the final detailing stages. This process follows a design spiral, as the requirements from each discipline are addressed as the design process sequentially. Although the research community has developed many computational tools for individual disciplinary analysis, the interaction across the disciplines is limited, and often manual. The integration of the design and analysis processes at all stages of the engineering cycle and across all disciplines would bring about a revolution in ship industry. No single environment has yet enabled multidisciplinary and collaborative engineering seamlessly integrating the various engineering processes. This proposal focuses on the development of an integrated design and synthesis environment with an underlying object-oriented, multi-user, multidisciplinary, distributed framework supporting the rapid engineering of Naval ships. It integrates the design and analysis processes through all stages of the engineering process across all disciplines and subsystems. This multi-disciplinary computational modeling framework will reduce the computational time and cost of Naval platform designs, and increase the reliability of numerical assessment of damage and control.