This paper presents and demonstrates a new design thinking framework for early stage complex ship design, called the Design Knowledge Management Square (DKMS) framework. The DKMS framework provides a structure that explicitly incorporates the collaborative nature of complex ship design, contrary to other models or frameworks that primarily focus on the technical integration of tools and methods to describe early stage complex ship design. The DKMS framework is applied to three case studies: 1) multi-disciplinary early stage design of complex ships, 2) the integration of concept design generation and analysis methods, and 3) the application of design rationale to support collaborative design decision-making. The case studies show that the DKMS framework provides added value by explicitly describing both the collaborative and technical nature of complex ship design. Thereby the framework helps to analyse, support, and understand complex ship design.@en

These operational processes are of a logistical nature. Therefore these processes have a significant impact on the arrangement of these ships. Early stage design efforts are aimed to understand the interaction between the layout and the operational processes aboard these ships to gain timely design insights to inform the decision-making process. Therefore, sufficiently detailed concept designs are to be generated by naval architects and analysed to derisk requirements. While various tools have been developed to support naval architects in generating layouts with various level of detail, the detailed evaluation of operational performance is typically postponed to the stage that only little change to the design is possible. While various research developed tools to analyse operational performance, there is still a mismatch between the level of detail of layouts and the level of detail of operational performance analysis. Hence, the naval architect’s expertise is crucial to develop concept designs with acceptable operational performance. To address this mismatch between layout generation and evaluation, this paper proposes an integrated method that allows naval architects to concurrently generate and evaluate sufficiently detailed layouts. A test case is presented in which the proposed method is used to generate a detailed layout for a Landing Platform Dock (LPD) and evaluate this layout based on operational processes. The test case shows that the method can indeed be used to generate and evaluate detailed layouts of internal layout and process driven ships. However, the implementation of tooling for this method proved to be challenging and thus requires further attention. Nonetheless, the test case indicates that the proposed method will improve early stage ship design by helping naval architects to better understand the complex interrelation between layout and operational processes. @en

During the early stages of ship design a set of design requirements needs to be selected, accounting for both financial and technical feasibility, and operational effectiveness. This process of requirements elucidation creates a need for information regarding the various design alternatives and their effect on the feasibility and effectiveness of the design requirements. Therefore various methods have been developed to support a naval architect. However, when one considers an internal layout and process driven ships, ships where the arrangement of spaces aboard has a strong influence on the effectiveness of the ship's operational processes, a gap in available methods have been identified. This paper proposes a method based on queueing networks that allows a naval architect to develop a model to study the effects of different arrangements on the execution of various sets of operational processes in a ship. Using this model a better understanding of the interaction and the interdependencies between the ship's arrangement and it's operational processes can be obtained. This understanding will eventually improve the requirements elucidation process and lead to the development of better sets of design requirements.

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onfiguration-driven ships distinct themselves from other ships as their ability to perform their function is strongly influenced by the layout of the vessel. Exploring the balance between the performance of the vessel and its functions is typically done during early stage ship design. However this is more complicated for configuration-driven ships as evaluating the performance also requires a layout. A previously developed concept exploration method using the TU Delft Packing approach is used, but requires extensions to enable concept exploration of configuration-driven ships. Because of the limited and uncertain design information during these early design stages and the complicated interrelations within the problem, a solution based on stochastic modelling is proposed. The paper concludes with a Poisson-based metric to evaluate the layout of configuration-driven ships. @en

This paper introduces a framework for analyzing distributed ship systems. The increase in interconnected and interdependent systems aboard modern naval vessels has significantly increased their complexity, making them more vulnerable to cascading failures and emergent behavior that arise only once the system is complete and in operation. There is a need for a systematic approach to describe and analyze distributed systems at the conceptual stage for naval vessels. Understanding the relationships between various aspects of these distributed systems is crucial for uninterrupted naval operations and vessel survivability. The framework introduced in this paper decomposes information about an individual system into three views: the physical, logical, and operational architectural representations. These representations describe the spatial and functional relationships of the system, together with their temporal behavior characteristics. This paper defines how these primary architectural representations are used to describe a system, the interrelations between the architectural blocks, and how those blocks fit together. A list of defined terms is presented, and a preliminary set of requirements for specific design tools to model these architectures is discussed. A practical application is introduced to illustrate how the framework can be used to describe the delivery of power to a high energy weapon.

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An early-stage design model is presented that estimates personnel locations on board a vessel during times of evacuation. This model takes into account various levels of uncertainty and pain that individuals may feel while heading toward safety, while simultaneously not requiring highly detailed information regarding the vessel layout. This makes this model suitable for analysis during early stages of design. To do this, principal eigenvector analysis is applied to the ship-centric Markov decision process model. Principal eigenvector analysis provides a leading indicator metric for forecasting and quantifying locations of individuals when coupled with the ship-centric Markov decision process model. For evacuation models suited for later stages of design, full temporal simulations may be required to understand long-term implications of personnel movement. This article proposes an alternative method that is able to identify some of these implications while not requiring full details of the vessel layout nor temporal simulations. To do this, a common theorem in Markov theory is applied that defines how the principal eigenvector represents the long-term steady-state behavior of the system. Metrics are defined that quantify the probability that an individual will congregate at specific locations on the vessels and highlight sensitivities to long-term behavior. A case study of a simplified vessel layout is presented that examines decision-making regarding ship egress analysis and general arrangements design. The results highlight specific areas of interest that cause significant changes to where individuals congregate and the probability they arrive safely at the exit. Sensitivity studies are performed varying the uncertainty in the movement of the individuals, how much pain they are experiencing, and one example where a passageway is blocked.@en

This paper applies network theory to understand the physical relationships in the general arrangements generated by TU Delft packing approach. The generated arrangements are converted into weighted graph networks. The authors have developed a new scoring metric using this network and have applied this to quantitatively assess qualitative properties of the different arrangements, enabling direct comparison between concept designs. Finding and understanding these specific physical properties of the arrangements should lead to improved design space exploration of layout features of the designs generated by the TU Delft packing approach.
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