A Knowledge-Based Approach for an Open Object Oriented Library in Ship Design.

Abstract

A vessel is a complex and integrated system, which is composed by several subsystems and parts which can have common interfaces and interact in a non-linear way. With the continuous development of ship design techniques, a continuous increase in the amount of information generated and handled by the design process can be noted. Having an efficient way of handling all this information during the vessel design process is essential to produce a relevant design in the competitive ship market.

This work proposes an investigation about how the conceptual design phase of a vessel can be approached and improved using concepts from Knowledge-Based Design, System-Based Ship Design and Open Source Software. These theories are combined to put together an Open Source Conceptual Ship Design Tools Library, which provides a set of design tools to be applied in the beginning of a vessel design process.

The development of the tools library is approached in details in this work. It is structured using the knowledge-based design prototype concept. The vessel is subdivided using system-based ship design theory to make the design task less cumbersome and easy to be handled by the tools library. JavaScript is used as an open standard to implement the tools library in a web-based platform. The way JavaScript should be used in order to better deal with the vessel subdivision is also discussed, putting some light in the object oriented programming methodology.

Once the tools library is implemented, a case study is conducted to evaluate how well and appropriate its performance is in a real world problem. This study is done in cooperation with Ulstein International, which provided precious information and discussions about their design process.