Ship design assessment through virtual prototypes

Abstract The traditional design process has been developed, through time, by trial and error, following an evolutive approach. By following this procedure, the design team focused its attention on only one conceptual design alternative at a time, which is perfected step by step until the expected outcome is obtained. Nevertheless nowadays, due to the high complexity of ships and increasingly stringent operational requirements, this approach appears to be obsolete in a market where cost and time reduction is a fundamental parameter. Indeed, to be competitive in the shipbuilding market, very accurate information should be available since the beginning of the process, to allow the design team a 360-degree exploration of a high number of alternatives and then identify the best design solution in no time. In this paper a new, rational, design process, necessary to raise efficiency and effectiveness of ship design, is presented. By using a multi-purpose design software, the authors were able to create a Virtual Prototype of a case study ship with ease and little training, obtaining, since early-stage design phases, some outputs of interest (such as longitudinally weight distribution of ship structures, preliminary midship section, GZ curves and powering curves) without great computational efforts. The most important benefit of using only one multipurpose software instead of multiple specific ones lies in the elimination of remarking activities for switching from one software to another, reducing loss of data’s risks during the process.