Investigating product data management during conceptual ship design: A study on software implementation and design changes
Abstract
The 21st-century maritime industry is unlike the traditional shipbuilding of the past - the fast pace in product development pushing the boundary all the time. However modern shipbuilding industry is still lacking technological advantages capered to other product developing the industry. The necessity of modernization and design optimization is leading this industry towards an advanced solution like detailed CAD design, automation, PLM and PDM implementation. This thesis aims to manage and utilize product data during the conceptual phase of the ship design. Due to the wide range of topic, the thesis is concentrated on the investigation of Platform Supply Vessel (PSV). To achieve the primary goal, a detail PSV is designed with rich 3D parts library by using Siemens NX. After that, a methodology is created to understand the merit and demerit of the PDM system. The main case study is performed based on the experience achieved from the simple case study. In this section, a detail general arrangement is made using the part library. At this stage, product data is created and utilized for visual representation and weight estimation. The result from the case study summarizes the research work. A comparative analysis is performed between simple and main case study to emphasize the advantages and challenges of the proposed method. Finally, the concluding discussion shows the potentiality of the PDM usage and its benefits during the conceptual phase of ship design.