A decision making framework for cruise ship design

Abstract

This thesis develops a new decision making framework for initial cruise ship design. Through review of effectiveness analysis and multi-criteria decision making, a uniform philosophy is created to articulate a framework that would enable a designer to more accurately assess what design alternatives are more important than others and how their changes affect the overall system being designed. Through a brief historical account, top-level Measures of Merit are developed and used with the framework and then applied to a requirements and effectiveness case study on initial concept development of a cruise ship. This is performed using Response Surface Methods to enable the user to visualize the design space as well as interact with it; the results and methods to visualize the design space are discussed. Finally, a Unified Tradeoff Environment is discussed, a framework that pools the aforementioned requirements and effectiveness analysis with design and technology forecasting to enable the user to make better informed requirements derivation and design selection.