A Generic Shipyard Computer Model – A Tool for Design for Production

Ship designers perform trade-offs frequently, but often without adequate information or tools to perform them. This results in many decisions that are sub-optimal. Too few tools have been developed to help the ship designer, and those that have, usually have been developed in businesses other than shipbuilding. Ship designers performing trade-off analysis are usually interested in the impact on service performance, although today more are looking at design for production impacts of their designs because of the recognition that acquisition cost is still the major life cycle cost contributor for commercial ships. Those that are considering Design for Production, attempt to develop relative costs of the alternatives by applying parametric cost estimating relationships, if available, or simply best judgment. A better tool would be a computer based generic shipyard model that the designer could use to quickly model a shipyard so that the alternative designs could be processed through the model of the shipyard and the resulting material manpower and schedule impacts be determined. Conversely, such a model could also be used to determine any necessary changes to the shipyard to make it suitable for a specific new design approach or new ship type. The paper describes a Generic Computer Shipyard Model developed as part of the graduate research sponsored by a NAVSEA Cooperative Agreement under the NA VSEA Professor of Ship Production Science, and give examples of its use as a Design for Production tool.