AVEVA announced a range of major new features to support the basic and detailed design activities for ships and offshore structures through the shipbuilding systems VANTAGE Marine 11.6 and Tribon M3. There is often a requirement to start cutting steel at an early stage of a shipbuilding project, sometimes even before the final approval has been obtained from the classification societies. The structural engineers work with the overall classification view of the ship while the detailed designers usually are responsible for certain individual hull blocks. This presents a dilemma in creating and maintaining two versions of the design simultaneously, one for basic structural design and one for the detailed design that supports the parts manufacturing tasks.

VANTAGE Marine 11.6 and Tribon M3 now present a solution to this problem. The systems maintain two parallel views of the design in the Ship Model database: a design view for the structural engineers and a production view for the detailed designers. The structural engineers create and maintain the design panels while the detail designers work with the production panels. The production panels are created from the design panels using the automatic block splitting facilities. After block splitting, the two views of the steel structural model are kept synchronized so that any change to a design panel will automatically impact the corresponding production panel. A late change from the classification society or the ship owner will become available not only in the basic design model but also immediately influence the parts definition work. Likewise a change to an individual part becomes known to the designers.

Many shipyards develop the basic design within their own organisation while they often subcontract all or part of the detailed design work. The new features support this work process by synchronising the design and production panels when the production panel data is being delivered from the subcontractor to the shipyard. In practice, this means that classification drawings can easily be updated with changes made by the subcontractors. In the same way, data for parts manufacture and assembly is updated with any changes made by the subcontractor during detailed design.

Large shipyards with parallel production lines or shipyards that outsource the manufacturing of the hull need to be flexible in terms of a late choice of production facilities. Also, panel line restrictions and lifting and transportation capacities determine the maximum size of blocks and assemblies that a shipyard can accommodate. These things have to be considered when creating the parts manufacturing and assembly information. They can lead to high costs of moving a design between production sites.

With the new features in VANTAGE Marine 11.6 and Tribon M3 it is possible to create alternative block and assembly definitions from the same design using the block splitting function. The alternatives can be analysed and the choice of production facility can be postponed until late in the process. In this way the work involved in creating the manufacturing information is minimized.

An existing production model (i.e. a Ship Model database containing production panels) can be reused for “reverse engineering” so that non-existent design panels can be created through an intelligent merger of production panels. The newly-obtained design panels can then be split to satisfy alternative production sites. This process can be applied to all Tribon Product Information Models created in earlier versions of the software back as far as Tribon 4.

In the global shipbuilding industry project execution time and flexibility are two important competitive factors. Complex ships like cruise vessels and navy ships are often subject to massive and late design changes. The management of these changes is of vital importance. Improved reuse of existing product models is another critical factor in design project management. According to AVEVA, the new features in VANTAGE Marine 11.6 and Tribon M3 will open doors to totally new ways of organising shipbuilding activities.