Modes of integrated collaborative ship design

The authors have developed a number of integrated collaborative design platforms within the shipbuilding industry. The platforms have addressed a range of integration and collaboration challenges from product data sharing and exchange, consistency management, change propagation, version management and design guidance. Solutions to these challenges are necessary when the design process is fragmented and distributed, to ensure that the right information gets to the right person at the right time to do the right work, i.e. the design process is co-ordinated. The platforms were developed within European Commission (EC) funded projects: VRShips, VIRTUE and SAFEDOR over eight years and demonstrated an evolution and refinement of the ideas, requirements and solutions to a point where the latest version of the platform is being used by industry and developed by an industrial user group. One of the factors contributing towards success was the development of approaches that visualise the solutions to these collaboration challenges. This paper discusses these solutions from a collaboration perspective.