The Keuper Saliferous beds of the Droitwich area

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A case study into an automated detailed layout generation approach in early stage naval ship design

The Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) of the Netherlands Ministry of Defence identified that detailing warship layouts to space level of detail during the concept definition design phase is a complex and time consuming process. Currently it can take up to 150 man hours to complete a feasible general arrangement plan (GAP).Yet, these GAPs are crucial for balancing requirements and budget with technical feasible designs. Insufficient consideration of spatial details during concept definition increases the probability that sizing and integration issues will emerge later in the design process.This paper discusses the first steps undertaken to integrate a new layout generation tool, called WARGEAR (WARship GEneral ARrangement), into the DMO ship design process. WARGEAR is able to semi-automatically generate feasible and balanced detailed layouts in a matter of minutes, thus providing almost real-time feedback and design insight to naval architects. In this paper the issues of tool validation and user acceptance are addressed via a realistic warship design test case and a presentation of the test case results to a larger group of naval architects and senior management at the DMO respectively.The test case showed that WARGEAR is able to generate detailed layouts that compare well to GAPs manually generated by naval architects. The attendees at the presentation were generally positive, but also provided valuable feedback for further development of the WARGEAR tool and methodology. This shows the potential of WARGEAR to increase the speed of detailed layout generation to a matter of minutes and to improve the early stage design process by providing early insight into detailed layouts and their design drivers.Ship Design, Production and Operation

WARGEAR: ‘Real time’ generation of detailed layout plans of surface warships during early stage design

Generating detailed warship layouts is crucial to check technical feasibility and performance consistent with emergent requirement elucidation during early stage design. However, generating feasible detailed layouts is a complex and time consuming task. Even today, detailed layout plans are often manually drawn using CAD software, taking up to 150 work hours to complete a single feasible layout plan, as found by the Netherlands Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO). As a result, the number of layout variations that can be generated and analysed is limited. This typically means that further detailed layout generation is postponed, increasing the risk of costly sizing and integration issues later in the design process. Therefore, a method that enables rapid insight into layout sizing issues is required. This paper elaborates on the mathematical working mechanisms of the WARship GEneral ARrangement (WARGEAR) tool, that has been developed to support naval architects in detailing ship arrangements to space level in a matter of minutes. Contributions are: (1) a probabilistic staircase placement algorithm, (2) a network-based approach combined with probabilistic selection for allocation of spaces to compartments, (3) the use of cross-correlation to quickly arrange spaces, and (4) a ‘carving’-based approach to ensure connectivity. A representative WARGEAR application case study is presented. This test shows how WARGEAR is able to confirm the feasibility of future warship arrangements at a high level of detail within minutes.Ship Design, Production and Operation