Ship System Design Space Exploration Using Templating

Research and an experimental study were performed to construct a flexible, user-friendly methodology that integrates ship system design into the Navy's early-stage ship design tool suite, called the Rapid Ship Design Environment (RSDE). This project establishes specified Naval ship system architecture and design use cases and examples that demonstrate the implementation of templates, or pre-designed segments of ship systems, to enable automation of ship system design for tradespace exploration. The use cases represent common functions RSDE users seek to perform in the ship design process, including mission system design, propulsion train and electrical system design, and associated full-ship studies for design exploration using templates. This research allows common systems and/or plant configurations to be easily accessible in a familiar format. To develop this methodology and implement templating in future projects, the methods, steps, and tools used are recorded and analyzed with feedback from various end-state users and technical experts.