Integrated decision support approach for ship design

This paper presents a simulation based benchmarking methodology for evaluation of ship designs. The approach utilizes hydrodynamic calculations to obtain correct powering and speed values in waves, hind-cast weather data, and a detailed mission profile. This information is combined in a simulation model to produce a detailed and realistic operational profile of the design. The operational profile is then aggregated into a set of key performance indicators, to enable easy comparisons of different designs. The main advantage of this methodology is that is provides detailed and realistic operational profiles of ship designs at an early stage of the design process without using expensive methods such as CFD or model tests. A simple test case is presented to show how this methodology may be used in practice to capture differences in performance between two similar ship designs. Further, the test case shows how these differences may be presented in a manor that makes it easy to compare the performance of the ship designs.