Prudent platform for multi-disciplinary ship design exploration, analysis and optimisation

Ship design spans many stages, which can be condensed into three principal ones: design definition, design evaluation and design correction. Design correction requires experiential and actual knowledge about the design, to make the right decision being both cheap and effective. This then becomes the cornerstone of design optimisation (be it interactive or automatic) and hence has to be an essential element of contemporary ship design software. In this paper we present a newly forged software platform .spiral™, which aims at multidisciplinary design exploration/optimisation, data analysis and decision support during early and later ship design stages. Multi-disciplinary design exploration implies integration of design and design evaluation tools under one umbrella along with process and data management technologies that automate the multidisciplinary design process and enable quality control. We also compare the platform with analogies available in the market and demonstrate it in action through examples.