An Object-oriented approach for Virtual prototyping in conceptual ship design

Abstract

The ship design activity often requires handling and storage of large amounts of data related to different systems inside the vessel, demanding for a structured way to organize it. This article suggests an object-oriented approach to handle virtual prototyping data during conceptual ship design. We start presenting some of the basic concepts related to objects, such as name, property and value. A proposal based on the entity, state and process models is addressed for the virtual prototyping, related to the object-oriented approach. Later, we use the SFI group system as hierarchy structure to represent the ship as an entity and state model. We finish by presenting some simple examples of the proposed approach with a modular ship models and introducing one suggestion of a virtual prototyping model using the concepts presented thorough the paper.