An Improved Ship Design Tool for Comparing Performance of Multiple Ship Designs across User-Defined Missions.

摘要

In the early stages of ship design, engineers from many different disciplines need to have confidence that a design being produced converges across the electrical, mechanical, and thermal domains, and that the design meets the needs of the stakeholders, and, that a particular design performs better or more optimally than other designs produced to accomplish a mission. The tools currently available do not permit the engineering teams to gain this insight in a reasonable amount of time. In this thesis, we discuss the improvements that we have made to our existing ship design tools in the S3D environment, allowing for a more concurrent collaboration between the engineers from all disciplines in the ship design process.;Incorporating the notion of time into our existing steady state solvers, we developed a controller class responsible for keeping track of time-related information and scheduling time-based events using the earliest deadline first algorithm. We have also incorporated Python script instructions in the form of an attribute inserted into the equipment models in order to allow the creation of control systems. Equipment models were also modified to provide information regarding time dependent metrics, such as fuel and energy, and in order to account for interdependencies between disciplines, they were also given the capacity to inform the mission analyzer tool about whether their dependencies have been satisfied. We developed an algorithm that uses this information to efficiently find a solution such that all dependencies between disciplines are satisfied. Implementing this algorithm, the mission analyzer is able to simulate each of the disciplines for a specified time frame and provide results that indicate whether a ship design is able to complete a mission and the possible costs such as equipment failures, and fuel consumed.