Ship design research project is complete

The three-year SHIPLYS (Ship life cycle software solutions) project was launched in response to the need of SME naval architects, shipbuilders and ship-owners to improve their capability to reduce the time and costs of design and production.

SHIPLYS provides these improvements by developing functionality that includes rapid virtual prototyping and the ability to factor in LCCA (Life Cycle Cost Analysis), environmental assessments, risk assessments and end-of-life considerations at the very early design stages when only limited data is available.

Major developments

Key tasks in the project included the development of a SHIPLYS platform enabling the integration of a variety of Applications used in early ship design; rapid early design and production simulation tools (Applications); LCCA, environmental and risk assessment software Applications for fast and cost-effective evaluation of alternatives; and the development of multi-criterion decision analysis techniques to support decision making across the short/ long term, based on explicit user defined decision criteria.

The SHIPLYS consortium, led by UK-based TWI Ltd, is formed of 12 partners from seven EU countries. They include Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd and Lloyd’s Register EMEA IPS.

Work within the SHIPLYS project started with analysing end users’ needs using the Quality Function Deployment method and selecting end-user cases, called design case “scenarios” that indicate the types of problems for which the project aspired to develop solutions.

The project continued with collecting relevant data and parameters for early ship design, LCCA, risk and environmental aspects, thus incorporating and building on the existing ISO 10303 Application Activity Model.