1 Parametric Cost Assessment of Concept Stage Designs

Deriving the cost of a vessel in the early design stages can be difficult. The design itself may only be represented in a conceptual form providing little concrete data against which a cost can be generated. Aspects of the design may yet to be determined leading to a great deal of uncertainty. Consequently, there is little incentive to look into the costs of a design in anything more than an indicative manner. Early evaluation of costing can be based on weight or space depending on the type of vessel as the quantity of materials or level of outfitting can be determined with a greater level of certainty. Paramarine’s early stage design environment is based on the Building Blocks methodology developed by UCL. Combined with a parametrically defined structural definition, the complete design can be deconstructed into materials, equipment and construction activities allowing the producability to be evaluated before reaching the initial design stage. In both areas of the software, searchable design data is associated with semantic information (space, weight, type etc) which can be audited to identify items for cost evaluation. Time to perform a cost evaluation is reduced as is the potential for mistakes. However, the designer is left with just having to assign a cost values, a potentially laborious process. This paper discusses the challenge of automating the process of cost assignment by using the semantic information associated with each item to determine how it is produced. By defining “production processes”, cost can be assigned by evaluating how much material and resource each item requires. A (microscopic) cost evaluation can now be performed as early as concept design more easily than many existing subjective rule based approaches. Furthermore, the costing model is based on concrete data which may be determined directly from production activities