Integrating detailed layout generation with logistic performance assessment to improve layout insights in early stage warship design

The performance of ‘internal layout and process driven ships’ is dominated by its operational processes. These operational processes are of a logistical nature. Therefore these processes have a significant impact on the arrangement of these ships. Early stage design efforts are aimed to understand the interaction between the layout and the operational processes aboard these ships to gain timely design insights to inform the decision-making process. Therefore, sufficiently detailed concept designs are to be generated by naval architects and analysed to de-risk requirements. While various tools have been developed to support naval architects in generating layouts with an increasing level of detail, the detailed evaluation of operational performance is typically postponed to the stage that only little change to the design is possible. Hence, the naval architect’s expertise is currently crucial to develop concept designs with acceptable operational performance. However, this limits the amount of explicit insight in layout performance available to decision makers. Therefore there is a need for an operational evaluation method that supports layout development in early stage ship design. To address this mismatch between layout generation and evaluation, this paper proposes an integrated method that allows naval architects to concurrently generate and evaluate sufficiently detailed layouts. A test case is presented in which the proposed method is used to generate a detailed layout for a Landing Platform Dock (LPD) and evaluate this layout based on operational processes. The test case shows that the method can indeed be used to generate and evaluate detailed layouts of internal layout and process driven ships. However, the implementation of tooling for this method proved to be challenging and thus requires further attention. Nonetheless, the test case indicates that the proposed method will improve early stage ship design by helping naval architects to better understand the complex interrelation between layout and operational processes