Virtual integration for ship and offshore systems design

In ship and offshore systems design, a systems engineering approach has been adopted to bring together all the disciplines involved and represents a unified view of the project. A Virtual Integration Platform (VIP) has been developed in the University of Strathclyde within two EU FP6 projects – VIRTUE and SAFEDOR, to address integration challenges faced in ship systems design. The VIP provides a holistic collaborative environment, with features product and lifecycle management, project/process management, data/knowledge management to ensure error-free interactions, distributed tools integration to address complexity, and version management to deal with multiple concepts of complex systems. An example of a ship system design involving structure, stability, and hydrodynamics studies is presented in the paper to demonstrate how the VIP could address the integration challenges. The VIP is being used in an EU FP7 project, EuroVIP, to promote collaboration among European maritime small and medium enterprises.