Reducing Detail Design and Construction Work Content by Cost-Effective Decisions in Early-Stage Naval Ship Design

Investigating physical solutions in the architectural design of distributed ship service systems

“…Recent studies in reducing vessel costs have demonstrated a strong correlation between construction cost and production time to outfit density [8,9]. The studies focused on evaluated basic ship outfit density -light ship weight less ship structure weight divided by total volume [9] -which provides an estimate of uniform density over the vessel. Thus, the outfit density metric does not provide information about the distribution of outfit density throughout the vessel.…”

“…Thus, the outfit density metric does not provide information about the distribution of outfit density throughout the vessel. Without this, the designer can still rely on historical results and best-practices such lengthening the vessel [62] to reduce engineering and production man-hours [9]. However, if more detailed information is available in early-stage design, designers can better understand how and why vessel arrangement and system connectivity impacts future vessel cost and the relative difficulty of detailed design and construction work.…”

“…The overall result is a higher, but more even balance of density across the vessel, which is reflected in the reduction of σ r from 1.40 to 0.81. Implications of increased system routing density can be evaluated with the positive relationship between outfit density and required production and engineering labor described in [9]. The routing density results suggest that the ring-bus distributed system solution may be more difficult to design and produce than the alternative, separated configurations.…”

“…Realizing these benefits requires understanding how technologies and their supporting systems integrate into the overall vessel design [3,4]. Design decisions affecting physical system integration pose significant implications for vessel vulnerability [5,6,3,7], producibility [8,9], cost [10,11], and other performance characteristics [12,13,14,15]. Providing insight into how early-stage layout and functional requirements affects these vessel characteristics can help inform related decision making processes [16].…”