Design for Production (A021)

Recently GRC added to the group of Paramarine's objects for Early Design to allow modern Design for Production (DfP) techniques to be applied at the initial design stage to enable evaluation of DfP issues right from the outset.

For vessels such as warships, submarines and offshore support with high design complexity, it is essential to consider production aspects of systems and outfit, including their routings, from the earliest stages of design in order to reduce the work content associated with production aspects of the vessel’s systems.

Deriving the cost of a vessel in the early design stages can be difficult. The design itself may only be represented in a conceptual form providing little concrete data against which a cost can be generated. Paramarine’s early stage design environment is based on the Building Blocks methodology by UCL. Combined with parametrically defined structural definition, the complete design can be deconstructed into materials, equipment and construction activities allowing the producability to be evaluated before reaching the more costly initial design stage.

In both areas of the software, searchable design data is associated with semantic information (space, weight, type, etc) which can be audited to identify items for cost evaluation. Time to perform a cost evaluation is reduces as is the potential for mistakes.

This has been implemented in Paramarine by linking the ‘functional design’ with production processes to generate feasibility and costing data associated with a particular build strategy. Different shipyard facilities can therefore be taken into account and the specific construction costs for a particular ship or submarine design ascertained.

Such cost and capability information are deliberately not "hardwired" as it is proprietary and varies considerably according to the facilities and production processes of a given shipyard.

The ultimate objective is to reduce rework, remove redundant complexity, and reduce the risk of an impractical production design feature being discovered late when the design moves to full development and production.