A model based approach to the automatic generation of block division plans

Abstract

European shipyards are building increasing amounts of complex ships such as off-shore, dredging or naval ships that are engineered-to-order. The block division is made when only preliminary hull structural design, functional compartments and the location of major equipment are known. The existing production scheduling optimization algorithms use a single manually created block division as a fixed input. Automatic generation of block division plans can potentially optimize the currently created production planning solutions because all work directly related to the construction of the ship on a shipyard is decomposed by the different chosen blocks.The preliminary design information and general arrangement of the ship, implicit knowledge of engineers and detailed information from comparable reference ships are known. A block division generator is developed to create multiple feasible Block division solutions. The different block division solutions result in deviations to relevant optimization objectives. It is concluded that it is possible to automatically generate block division plans that can be effectively used in ship production optimization algorithm. Due to simplifications in the block division generator and the erection sequence optimization algorithm, no quantitative optimization potential can be determined.