SummaryThe Shipbuilding 4.0 at the principles of the Industry 4.0 will transform the design, manufacturing, operation, shipping, services, production systems, maintenance and value chains in the all aspects of the shipbuilding industry. Over the last few years, the fourth industrial revolution has spread in almost all industries. The whole world is talking about Industry 4.0 which has increased implication in the manufacturing process and the future of the work. The impact of the Shipbuilding 4.0 will be significant. In the past, shipbuilding industry where continuously improved with new machines, software and new implemented organizational restructuring. In today shipbuilding industry, there are three main problems that are considered; production efficiency, the ship safety, cost efficiency and energy conservation and environmental protection. In order to create new value, the ship must become a Smart Ship capable of "thinking", and to be produced in Smart Shipbuilding Process. The aim of this article is a review of the present academic and industrial progress of this new industrial revolution wave in the shipbuilding sector called Shipbuilding 4.0 (Shipping 4.0, Maritime 4.0, Shipyard 4.0). Reviewed publications were analyzed different topics and level of improvements in the industrial aspects of the society. The implementation of the Shipbuilding 4.0 in the shipbuilding industry, presents the future, creating new value in the process, creating new demands with reduction in production and operational cost while increasing production efficiency.

The core competence of any medium-to-large sized shipyard includes the panel assembly line. Ship panels are the basic building blocks of well over 60% of the interim products of typical commercial ships. Therefore the improvement of the panel assembly process could greatly reduce the number of man-hours of all assembled panels, thereby yielding significant savings to the shipyard. Using a lean methodology to make kaizen improvements to traditional panel assembly lines will greatly reduce the costs in ship production. This means that shipyards, which are barely keeping earnings above costs, will be able to increase profits. Value stream mapping is a key way of determining how lean a production process is. The wastes in production assembly are readily identified as well as the takt time and the areas where there is push as opposed to pull. In this paper, a case study of a typical commercial shipyard, which builds a product mix of vessels is analyzed. The present state panel assembly line is mapped and then using lean tools and avant-garde technologies, such as hybrid laser arc welding, the new transformed panel assembly line is demonstrated to bring man-hour reductions of over 80%, so that a typical panel is assembled using 12 man-hours as opposed to the present 72 man-hours.

SummaryIn recent years, shipyards have been facing difficulties in controlling operational costs. To maintain continual operation of all of the facilities, a shipyard must analyze ways of utilizing present production systems for assembling interim vessel products as well as other types of industrial constructions. In the past, new machines continuously improved shipbuilding processes, including software and organizational restructuring, but management continued to search for a modern technological concept that will provide higher productivity, greater profit and overall reduction in costs. In the article the authors suggest implementing Design for Production, Design for Maintainability and Group Technology principles using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to apply to multi criteria decision making methods as an efficient tool for maintaining international competitiveness in the modern shipbuilding industry. This novel methodology is implemented through four phases. In the first phase, the present situation analysis is suggested for a real shipyard by establishing closest relations among production lines. The second phase presents a constraint analysis that must be evaluated when developing the design solution. The third phase involves generating a typical number of selected alternatives of the Design for Production, Design for Maintainability and Group Technology principles. In the fourth phase, the optimal design solution is selected using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. The solution incorporating this modern methodology will improve productivity, profit and lead to decreasing operational costs.

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The main shipbuilding assembly processes greatly influence the flow of interim products in a newbuilding shipyard. The panel assembly line is a major process located upstream of all the other shipyard assembly processes. In a previous paper, the application of lean principles enabled a balanced and smaller takt time along the workstations and yielded significant savings in man-hours. Although a panel consists of butt-welded steel plates with multiple fillet-welded longitudinal stiffeners, a built-up panel is this same panel fitted with longitudinal and transverse steel elements. Since there are many internal structural elements, the man-hours along a traditional built-up panel assembly line are multiple times greater than that of panel assembly. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze and map built-up panel assembly in an actual newbuilding shipyard. Using value stream mapping along with kaizen principles of continual improvement to determine the transformative steps to make the traditional built-up panel assembly line leaner. This enables significant man-hour reductions of about 60%, which yields remarkable cost savings to the shipyard.