Seeing a Sea of Ships - Exploring the Ship Design Space in the Digital Domain

Abstract

We tackle in this work aspects of the ship design space in the digital domain, with an overview of the current status and opportunities to shift from fixed arrangements towards open technologies, proposing a mix of open and proprietary databases. The discussion is focused on the visual domain and digital thread in ship design. Literature examples from the Brazilian case and the visualization of the ocean space are presented (Numerical Offshore Tank - TPN), followed by the Japanese services to design and optimize hull for specific
missions (NMRI), and lastly the current open ship design library developed in Norway (Vessel.js, NTNU). We present the argument that seeing a sea of ships, that is, visualizing the behavior of many options is already a reality, accessible from a portable device, without the need a large cluster as in the past, exemplified by web-based cases. Our conclusion is that computer graphics approaches to Ship Design should be considered open and exchangeable. Naval architects should focus on what they do best: creating, analyzing, refining,
storing and populating the database of the know-how from the institution (e.g. university, research institute or company).