Handling Ship Design Complexity to Enhance Competitiveness in Ship Design

Abstract

Ship design is inherently complex. In the literature, typically, complexity is associated with increased cost and requires more advanced tools, better procedures, expertise, and man-resources to deal with it. In the design literature complexity is mainly discussed with a focus on its negative consequences and in some cases positive consequences which can enhance competitiveness. This thesis explores how to improve ship design competitiveness by better handling ship design complexity. This research critically reviews and elaborates the effects of complexity on competitiveness in ship design, its directionality and magnitude. Assuming that complexity affects ship design competitiveness at the product, process, and firm levels, this thesis suggests that to improve the way daily ship design activities are carried out, it is necessary to identify the sources of complexity and strategies for handling it. This study is framed by two main questions: 1) what are the most important complexity factors in conceptual ship design, and how do they influence ship design competitiveness? and 2) how can a systemic ship design approach help designers to better handle complexity?

An extensive literature review is carried out to explore the role of complexity in ship design, its measures, and how complexity and competitiveness are related. As outcome of literature study, nine complexity factors—structural, temporal, behavioural, perceptual, contextual, dimensional, spatial, decision-making, and technological—are identified and presented to explain complexity aspects related to product, process, firm or the market situation in ship design. Each of these generic factors is translated into a ship design context and explained with examples from real ship design practices. Ship design competitiveness, in this research study, is explained according to three main design perspectives: design for effectiveness, design for efficiency, and design for efficacy. Items constructing ship design complexity and competitiveness are identified in the literature review, translated into ship design context and categorized based on expert judgment and factorial analysis. This research introduces a model for the measurement of ship design complexity and ship design competitiveness, and their influence on each other based on predefined factors and their respective constituting items. An investigative model is developed based on the literature review and a set of hypotheses are developed to support the investigative model. The null hypothesis of this study suggests that ‘there is no relationship between ship design complexity and ship design competitiveness’ and the alterative hypotheses suggest ‘ship design complexity influences ship design competitiveness negatively’. A quantitative data analysis approach is used to test the investigative model and confirm/reject the hypotheses.

The result of the study shows there is a significant relationship between complexity and competitiveness in ship design. The research results suggest that the presence of complexity in ship design can explain 52% of the variability in ship design competitiveness. Five of the complexity factors directional, decision-making, behavioural, contextual, and temporal have a negative influence on ship design competitiveness. While four complexity factors of spatial, structural, perceptual, and technological – have a positive influence, indicating that one-unit change in the factor will produce a positive change in ship design competitiveness. These findings are not entirely compatible with the set of defined alternative hypotheses, which suggested that all nine factors have a negative influence on ship design competitiveness. Although they were compatible with some literature.

Based on the findings of this research some product, process and organization related items constituting complexity factors have positive influence on ship design competitiveness while some others have negative consequence. For example, extra added functionalities in the design solutions or portfolio diversity increase product complexity, while they increase competitiveness. On the other side the result of this study shows more complex vessels as a consequence of large size and high installed power are less competitive solutions. In the organizational level the result of this study shows distributed design offices increases organizational complexity, while it increases competitiveness by better access to different markets. Meanwhile, intransparent, unstable organizations with several hierarchical levels are less competitive based on the findings of this research. Therefore, this research does not conclude directly on the effect of product, process and organizational complexity on ship design competitiveness. Although it shows how different complexity items generated from product, process, organization or market sources influence ship design competitiveness.

Despite the differences in the perception of how the diverse ship design factors contribute to ship design competitiveness, ship designers do not seem to put a great deal of emphasis and effort into them. The result of this research can help ship design firms and ship designers concentrate their efforts on those factors perceived as more important and put less emphasis on those with the lower influence on their competitiveness. Based on the results from dependency analysis, complexity handling methods to enhance competitiveness are explored as succeeding steps. A particular systemic design approach to handle complexity in ship design is further explored and discussed. The method is developed based on Ulstein’s Accelerated Business Development (ABD) approach and expanded upon by more relevant tools and techniques. As an outcome of this study twenty measures (courses of actions) and means (relevant tools, and techniques) are suggested to improve ship design competitiveness. Exploratory user-cases from the offshore vessel, cruise ship, and RoPax vessel market segments are used in this research work to discuss how suggested means and measures are applicable in daily ship design practices.

The units of the quantitative analysis in this research are ship designs developed by Ulstein and seven other major Norwegian ship design firms since year 2000. The data analysed in the quantitative study include data for 100 different design classes representing 476 vessels sold to 136 different customers in the market. Analysed data are collected from diverse company internet profiling, vessel registrations, and tracking data sources in the public domain. A multivariate regression analysis is used as a quantitative method to analyse the collected data, while qualitative approach is used to interpret the results and findings of quantitative study. Such qualitative evaluations involved discussions with senior designers, salespeople, and business analysts at Ulstein. This empirical analysis has focused only on a specific vessel segment developed by Norwegian design firms. Changes in vessel segment or expanding the analysis to design firms from other regions might influence the results. Therefore, the generalisation of the results herein is limited until further studies can cover a wider range of vessel types and more geographically diverse design firms.