Modeling and data exchange in a concurrent and collaborative design environment for electric ships

Recent advances in the sensor and weapons systems being installed on US Navy ships and the electrification required to power them are now forcing the engineering community to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the tools and processes now in use. At the same time, over the last decade there have been significant changes in the way that software is architected and developed. User expectations for software tools have also radically changed. Newly minted engineers have grown to expect that any needed information can be easily found and that interactions with peers can happen seamlessly, allowing for ideas to freely flow. Now, more than at any other time, the complexity of the design of modern ships calls for new design tools and methods that permit, early in the design process, interactions and the exchange of information and ideas between all major disciplines including electrical, mechanical, thermal, control engineers, and the traditional naval architecture and marine engineering teams. The Electric Ship Research and Development Consortium (ESRDC) has developed a collaborative design environment called S3D (Smart Ship System Design) with the goal of reforming the way in which engineers collaborate, model, design, and simulate complex systems, bringing together, as never before, the various disciplines involved in the ship design process. This paper will focus on the modeling and data exchange concerns that have typically represented major obstacles in the implementation of a collaborative design environment and the approaches taken by ESRDC and others to resolve these problems.