Marine Design, 3-4 September 2014, Coventry, UK
adopters of CASD are realising that “caution is still due against blind dependence on calculated data (…). We must continue to seek the proper balance between man and machine” [18], and that CASD should include new developments “that both foster insight and creativity, rather than just provide faster and more detailed numeric analysis”[19].
As a result, CASD developers are attempting to allow for multidisciplinary design space exploration with an improved user experience [20]: CD-Adapco´s Starccm+ version 8.06 includes a “Simulation Assistant”, which is “an interactive user interface that allows users to reproduce best practices and deploy them across the whole organization, ensuring repeatability of processes and enforcing consistency
of results”. Dassault´s
Solidworks 2014 “has been developed to allow its users to transfer their creative ideas from design sketches and images into
3D models faster than before, while
expanding the set of design tools that allow them to spread out into other markets”.
The tool’s usability, that is, the capacity of the user to take advantage of a given tool for a given task, is the decisive factor, whereas the initial ambition of CASD is to “aid” the designer. In a previously cited paper [6], Tore Ulstein and Per Olaf Brett asked: “Do design software tools make a difference? It is also interesting to notice that with now a continual introduction of different supporting ship
design analysis
complimentary software and related applications over a 30 year period, this development has led to an even greater fragmentation and partition of the ship design process. So many complex interfaces of these software tools have been generated without necessarily bringing more true understanding to the subject of effective ship design and new building execution. It might seem that for every new software system being brought to the work desks of the designers, he or she is up against an almost incomprehensible challenge to keep track, control and see the interactive influences the various good intended analysis tools produce,
individually, and as integrated
back to back calculating machines. (…) Experience at Ulstein indicates that problems of incompatibility and an over-complex situation in overseeing the consequences and implications of setting the constraints and boundary conditions of imperfect input and output data might have overshadowed the gains. (…) [It] has so far perhaps added more uncertainty and complexity to the task at hand, than it has improved the situation. [We did see benefits] but here the complexity and lack of human capacity and capability to handle all the variables and their influences within a meaningful context for everyday decision-making is perhaps not as could be hoped for.”
3.4 SIMULATION AND VISUALISATION TOOLS
Simulation tools are moving towards the early phase of the design process, and, as such, provide a great way to
“rapid-prototype” how well a ship can perform a given mission (the most basic of these being to reach a given speed using a given power output). However, such tools are only used by the happy few because of their cost (both hardware and software) and their complexity. The capacity to rapid-prototype a ship for a given mission enables the designer to quickly explore the design space, by changing the ship’s mission; this is common practice in formal design optimisation, where constraints are changed or softened to push the boundaries of the design space exploration. “Blind” exploration of the design space
would be too time-consuming and counter-
productive (generating non valid designs), so research into using the insight and knowledge of experienced designers with regard to the design optimisation loop has been initiated [21]. After only a few iterations of the optimisation loop (which would typically
refined in that direction. The
produce
several hundred different valid designs), the designer is asked to select the designs that seem most interesting, and the optimisation is
bottleneck in this process is the interaction between the designer and the optimisation system: how to clearly present say 100 different designs that usually have only small differences between them? What information should be made available to the designer at that stage? Is the same information made available from one designer to another? Here again, the perspective of the user is fundamental. In Section 4.4 we present several ideas to begin addressing these questions.
tools, suites of
4. SKETCHING FUTURE PROCESSES AND TOOLS FOR SHIP DESIGN
After 50 years of experience with CASD, Nowacki urged both the designers and the CASD developers to “regard ship design as a learning experience and the design system as a learning tool”, highlighting the need to “improve feedback of intermediate and final results” and “apply simulation and visualization to illustrate cause of design effects”[18]. In the sections below, we make several proposals in this direction.
4.1 EXPLORING ACTORS INTERACTIONS ON A TIMELINE
At the very early phases of design (steps 1 and 2 described in section 3.1), also called the “fuzzy front end”, the actors must address numerous
uncertainties in
terms of how the different pieces of the design puzzle interact with each other. For example, which shipyard to approach, and how to approach it? Should consultants be involved in the process, with the hope of landing a better design, but with an immediate added cost to the process? To explore these interactions, we propose a type of strategy board game, in which the most important actors and design steps are modelled, the goal being to visualise different strategies, and include different actors and their implications in the process. Figure 3 shows a mock-up of how this board game could look, as used on a white
©2014: The Royal Institution of Naval Architects
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