Design Activity Modeling

The design phase of a naval vessel is extraordinarily complex. The numerous interactions between design specialties have great potential to result in misunderstandings and confusion among engineers, which can then lead to deadline extensions or unnecessary rework. To overcome the difficulties coordinating ship design specialties, our effort seeks to simulate candidate design processes through the construction of a complete ship design planning tool. This planning tool lays out the effects of resources, requirements, and product quality on the overall design schedule, allowing ship design managers (SDMs) to more efficiently task and control work. The tool specifically includes the impacts of iterations on the overall convergence of the design. As a demonstration we focused on modeling the power and propulsion elements of the ship design.