Life-Cycle Virtual Reality Ship Systems VRSHIPS - ROPAX 2000

Present situation

Maritime transport and shipbuilding,including activities on the offshore sector, are critical parts of Europe`s economy, industry and commerce, trade and tourism. Europe`s shipbuilding is world leading in high-tech and complex ship constructions, particulary passenger ships (cruisers and ferries), containerships, LNG and LPG tankers, etc. Shipbuilding means not only work for the shipyards, but also for the European equipment manufacturers.

Increasing competition from the Far East threatens many European shipyards who can only rely on the use of critical and advanced technologies against cheap labour costs to remain competitive. As such it is crucial to keep Europe`s competitive edge against world-wide competition, one of the main challenges is to integrate information technologies into the ship`s life cycle process.

Task description

VRSHIPS - ROPAX 2000 is a EC-promoted research project with 44 co-operating partners from 19 European countries. The project will deliver a life cycle model for a combined RollOn - RollOff and Passenger Ferry (ROPAX 2000). The Department of Production Technology I will create a business process model of the design and production phase of a ship of the merchant navy.

This model will be transferred into a planning and a simulation model. The model has to provide information concerning the resources and information for every single function in the shipbuilding process. Therefore it is necessary to integrate the information, the material and the resources needed in the different processes from other workpackages of the project.

Solution

An achitecture with integrated product-data and process-data will be able to fulfil the required necessities. The product-data will be build up in an expanded Entity Relationship Model (eERM) with an hierarchical structure following the structure following the structure of the ships systems and its specification.

The different resources as manpower and machinery, infomation and material can be stored in other models like for example organisation-structures or Bills of Material (BoM). The processes will be modelled in an enhanced Event-orientated Process Chain (eEPC). The needed information for a single function can be attached from the models for the product data and resources. This model will be checked and optimised process performance will be detected. Afterwards the model will be transferred into a planning model and a simulation model for further optimisation and integration into the virtual platform of the project.