Overview
The face of ship design is changing. The vastly increasing complexity of European built ships and maritime structures as well as the growing number of rules and regulations call for novel concepts of product design and testing. HOLISHIP develops the next generation of ship design systems for the European maritime industry by addressing urgent problems of today’s ship design practice and focuses on future requirements by developing a holistic ship design concept capable of meeting tomorrow’s challenges.
Most maritime products are typically associated with large investments and are seldom built in large series. Where other modes of transport benefit from the economy of series production, this is not the case for maritime products which are typically designed to refined customer requirements increasingly determined by the need for high efficiency, flexibility and low environmental impact at a competitive price. Product design is thus subject to global trade-offs among traditional constraints (customer needs, technical requirements, cost) and new requirements (life-cycle, environmental impact, rules). One of the most important design objectives is to minimise total cost over the economic life cycle of the product, taking into account maintenance, refitting, renewal, manning, recycling, environmental footprint, etc. The trade-off among all these requirements must be assessed and evaluated in the first steps of the design process on the basis of customer / owner specifications.
Advanced product design needs to adapt to profound, sometimes contradicting requirements and assure a flexible and optimised performance over the entire life-cycle for varying operational conditions. This calls for novel design tools including multi-objective optimisation and virtual testing of the overall design and its components. HOLISHIP addresses these urgent industry needs by the development of innovative design methodologies, including design requirements (technical constraints, performance indicators, life-cycle cost, environmental impact) at an early design stage and for the entire life-cycle in an integrated design environment. This concept will be implemented in integrated design s/w platforms and demonstrated by digital mock-ups and a large range of industry led application studies on the design and performance of ships maritime structures.
HOLISHIP started in September 2016 and will soon publish more information at www.holiship.eu .