Integration of System Templating into the Rapid Ship Design Environment

Abstract

Navy ship mission systems are increasingly power-intensive and integrated and thus are increasingly dependent on ship system performance, especially the electrical distribution, thermal management, and data control systems. In recognition of this, the U.S. Navy has recently worked with the Electric Ship Research and Development Consortium to develop Smart Ship Systems Design (S3D), a ship system design software environment fully integrated with the Navy’s early-stage ship design toolkit. In addition, the associated templating process provides a level of automation to system design, thus providing a capability for the design and analysis of ship systems much earlier in the design process than was previously possible.

Research and an experimental study were performed to construct a flexible, user-friendly methodology that integrates S3D and its templating tools into the Navy’s Rapid Ship Design Environment (RSDE). This project establishes specified use cases and examples that demonstrate this implementation. The use cases represent common functions that RSDE users seek to implement in the ship design process. The targeted use cases include mission system, propulsion train and electrical system design, and associated full ship studies for design exploration. This research is pivotal to the design process and allows common systems and/or plant configurations to be accessible in a familiar format.

To develop this methodology and implement S3D templating in future projects, the methods, steps, and tools used are recorded and analyzed with feedback from various end-state users and technical experts.