Interim Report on S3D/LEAPS Integration

The Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division has created the Leading Edge Architecture for Prototyping Systems, or LEAPS, as the data repository for ship design, and a significant number of the early-stage ship design tools interface directly or through a translator with LEAPS. Separately, the Office of Naval Research has funded Smart Ship Systems Design (S3D), a ship design tool effort that expands the Navy’s toolkit to include simulation and distributed system design among other capabilities. The current project will integrate S3D with LEAPS. This report provides an interim status report on progress for the integration project. The project plan and use case are described, underlying terms are defined and correlated between the two databases, and the initial version of the translator code is described

Distributed Ship Service Systems Architecture in The Early Stages of Designing Physically Large and Complex Vessels: The Submarine Case

In the initial sizing of complex vessels, where recourse to type ship design can be overly restrictive, one crucial set of design features has traditionally been poorly addressed. This is the estimation of the weight and space demands of the various Distributed Ship Services Systems (DS3), which include different types of commodity services beyond those primarily associated with the ship propulsion system. In general, naval vessels are typified by extensive and densely engineered DS3, with the modern naval submarine being at the extreme of dense outfitting. Despite this, the ability for the concept designer to consider the impact of different configurations for the DS3 arrangements has not been readily addressed in concept design. This paper describes ongoing work at University College London (UCL) to develop a novel DS3 synthesis approach utilising computer tools, such as Paramarine™, MATLAB®, and CPLEX®, which provide the concept designer with a quantitative network-based evaluation to enable DS3 space and weight inputs early in the design process. The results of applying the approach to a conventional submarine case study indicate quantitative insights into early DS3 sizing can be obtained. The paper concludes with likely developments in concluding the research study

The Network Block Approach Applied to the Initial Design of Submarine Distributed Ship Service Systems

The paper follows on from a recent IJME paper and summarises a new early-stage ship design approach. This is termed the Network Block Approach (NBA) and combines the advantages of the UCL 3D physically based ship synthesis Design Building Block (DBB) approach and the Virginia Tech originated Architecture Flow Optimisation (AFO) method for distributed ship service systems (DS3). The approach has been applied to submarine DS3 design and utilises: a set of novel frameworks; and Qinetiq’s Paramarine CASD suite features. The proposed NBA enables the development of a submarine concept design to different levels of granularities. These range from modelling individual spaces to locating various DS3 components and system routings. The proposed approach also enables the designer to balance the energy demands of a set of distributed systems. This is done by performing a steady-state flow simulation and visualising the complexity of the submarine DS3 in a 3D multiplex network configuration. The potential benefits and limitations from such a 3D based physical and network synthesis are presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of the Network Block Approach comparing it to previous applications of network theory which have been to surface ship design. It concludes that it would be possible to better estimate DS3 weight and space inputs to early-stage submarine design and also enable radical submarine configurations and DS3 options to be reflected in early stage submarine design for better concept exploration and requirement elucidation. Finally, further work on the sensitivity of the approach to designer inputs will be addressed in future papers

Derivation of Power System Module Metamodels for Early Shipboard Design Explorations

The U.S. Navy is currently challenged to develop new ship designs under compressed schedules. These ship designs must necessarily incorporate emerging technologies for high power energy conversion in order to enable smaller ship designs with a high degree of electrification and next generation electrified weapons. One way this challenge is being addressed is through development of collaborative concurrent design environment that allows for design space exploration across a wide range of implementation options. The most significant challenge is assurance of a dependable power and energy service via the shipboard Integrated Power and Energy System (IPES). The IPES is largely made up of interconnected power conversion and distribution equipment with allocated functionalities in order to meet demanding Quality of Power, Quality of Service and Survivability requirements. Feasible IPES implementations must fit within the ship hull constraints and must not violate limitations on ship displacement. This Thesis applies the theory of dependability to the use of scalable metamodels for power conversion and distribution equipment within a collaborative concurrent design environment to enable total ship set-based design outcomes that result implementable design specifications for procurement of equipment to be used in the final ship implementation

An architectural framework for distributed naval ship systems

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

A Network-Based Design Synthesis of Distributed Ship Services Systems for a Non Nuclear Powered Submarine in Early Stage Design

Even though the early-stage design of a complex vessel is where the important decisions are made, the synthesis of the distributed ship service systems (DS3) often relies on “past practice” and simple vessel displacement based weight algorithms. Such an approach inhibits the ability of the concept designer to consider the impact of different DS3 options. It also reduces the ability to undertake Requirements Elucidation, especially regarding the DS3. Given the vital role the many DS3 provide to a submarine, this research considers whether there is a better way to synthesise DS3 without resorting to the detailed design of the distributed systems, which is usually inappropriate at the exploratory stages of design. The research proposes a new approach, termed the Network Block Approach (NBA), combining the advantages of the 3D physical based synthesis UCL Design Building Block (DBB) approach with the Virgina Tech Architectural Flow Optimisation (AFO) method, when applied to submarine DS3 design. Utilising a set of novel frameworks and the Paramarine CASD tool, the proposed approach also enabled the development of the submarine concept design at different levels of granularities, ranging from modelling individual spaces to various DS3 components and routings. The proposed approach also allowed the designer to balance the energy demands of various distributed systems, performing a steady-state flow simulation, and visualising the complexity of the submarine DS3 in a 3D multiplex network configuration. Such 3D based physical and network syntheses provide potential benefits in early-stage submarine DS3 design. The overall aim of proposing and demonstrating a novel integrated DS3 synthesis approach applicable to concept naval submarine design was achieved, although several issues and limitations emerged during both the development and the implementation of the approach. Through identification of the research limitations, areas for future work aimed at improving the proposal have been outlined