Design for Support in the Initial Design of Naval Combatants

The decline of defence budgets coupled with the escalation of warship procurement costs have significantly contributed to fleet downsizing in most major western navies despite little reduction in overall commitments, resulting in extra capability and reliability required per ship. Moreover, the tendency of governments to focus on short-term strategies and expenditure has meant that those aspects of naval ship design that may be difficult to quantify, such as supportability, are often treated as secondary issues and allocated insufficient attention in Early Stage Design. To tackle this, innovation in both the design process and the development of individual ship designs is necessary, especially at the crucial early design stages. Novelty can be achieved thanks to major developments in computer technology and in adopting an architecturally-orientated approach to early stage ship design. The existing technical solutions aimed at addressing supportability largely depend on highly detailed ship design information, thus fail to enable rational supportability assessments in the Concept Phase. This research therefore aimed at addressing the lack of a quantitative supportability evaluation approach applicable to early stage naval ship design. Utilising Decision Analysis, Effectiveness Analysis, and Analytic Hierarchy Process, the proposed approach tackled the difficulty of quantifying certain aspects of supportability in initial ship design and provided a framework to address the issue of inconsistent and often conflicting preferences of decision makers. Since the ship’s supportability is considered to be significantly affected by its configuration, the proposed approach utilised the advantages of an architecturally-orientated early stage ship design approach and a new concept design tool developed at University College London. The new tool was used to develop concept level designs of a frigate-sized combatant and a number of variations of it, namely configurational rearrangement with enhancement of certain supportably features, and an alternative ship design style. The design cases were then used to demonstrate the proposed evaluation approach. The overall aim of proposing a quantitative supportability evaluation approach applicable to concept naval ship design was achieved, although several issues and limitations emerged during both the development as well as the implementation of the approach. Through identification of the research limitations, areas for future work aimed at improving the proposal have been proposed

Aeronautical Engineering: A Continuing Bibliography with Indexes (supplement 194)

This bibliography lists 369 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in November 1985

Preliminary design of conventional and unconventional surface ships using a building block approach

Current naval ship design programmes are considered to be inadequately served by the preliminary ship design methodologies used to develop initial design features. This is due to a reliance on numerical design approaches that do not fully reflect the complex nature of the naval ship design problem. A new ''Building Block" design methodology is demonstrated. This methodology uses design descriptions integrating functional, and architectural issues with numerical design descriptions as functional Building Blocks. The Building Block methodology allows designers to undertake decision making during preliminary design with knowledge of all important design issues. The thesis scope includes all commonly encountered naval surface ship requirements for monohulls and also for unconventional hullform types, such as Trimaran. Justification for a new design methodology is presented in Part one of the thesis. General engineering design and specific naval design issues are detailed, leading to a discussion of current design methodologies. Comparison of alternative ship design methodologies highlights the need for an integrated approach based on architecture. The requirement for an architecturally centred design methodology leads to the Building Block design methodology, detailed in Part two. Major surface ship methodology issues are detailed. The concept of the design generator is developed as being that requirement which defines the section of the overall ship design space in which a final design will reside. The discussion considers the application of the new methodology to monohull ships, focusing on an Escort Frigate requirement. The methodology is also applied to amphibious landing ships and small naval vessels, demonstrating the effects of size and operational requirements on applicability. The discussion also demonstrates the application to unconventional craft by development of Trimaran and SWATH designs, noting that the more complex unconventional design problems encountered, benefited from the Building Block methodologies' strengths

Proceedings of the 9th MIT/ONR workshop on C3 Systems, held at Naval Postgraduate School and Hilton Inn Resort Hotel, Monterey, California June 2 through June 5, 1986

GRSN 627729"December 1986."Includes bibliographical references and index.Sponsored by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Cambridge, Mass., with support from the Office of Naval Research. ONR/N00014-77-C-0532(NR041-519) Sponsored in cooperation with IEEE Control Systems Society, Technical Committee on C.edited by Michael Athans, Alexander H. Levis

Data systems concepts for space systems, phase 1

Deviations from the traditional spacecraft data systems were studied. A data system architecture was developed from the top down

Data-driven maintenance of military systems:Potential and challenges

The success of military missions is largely dependent on the reliability and availability of the systems that are used. In modern warfare, data is considered as an important weapon, both in offence and defence. However, collection and analysis of the proper data can also play a crucial role in reducing the number of system failures, and thus increase the system availability and military performance considerably. In this chapter, the concept of data-driven maintenance will be introduced. First, the various maturity levels, ranging from detection of failures and automated diagnostics to advanced condition monitoring and predictive maintenance are introduced. Then, the different types of data and associated decisions are discussed. And finally, six practical cases from the Dutch MoD will be used to demonstrate the benefits of this concept and discuss the challenges that are encountered in applying this in military practice

Aeronautical Engineering: A continuing bibliography (supplement 158)

This bibliography lists 499 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in January 1983