Design of Efficient General Arrangements: a software aid to the decision making process

摘要

The layout of compartments in a warship represents a fine balance between the conflicting requirements of the purpose of the compartment and its contents, its accessibility, effect on overall vulnerability and stealth, and a number of other factors. There is no absolute right or wrong answer to this problem. For any one vessel, there are many possible solutions that could be considered to be broadly as good as each other. The advent of Integrated Full Electric Propulsion (IFEP) as an option that could be selected for future warships increases the flexibility afforded to the designers. For example, the shaft line no longer drives many of the decisions taken regarding the layout at the aft end. Decisions regarding the layout of the ship's compartments are taken at an early stage in the design process, and require careful consideration and justification, as subsequent changes may be very costly, if at all practicable. This paper presents a software tool developed with a view to aiding the decision making process, as well as providing input to the audit trail backing up the decision. A graphical user interface allows the designer to interactively locate compartments, and to test the arrangement against a set of rules read from a database that dictate how the positions of different compartments must relate to one another. The merit of a particular arrangement can be 'scored' against these rules, providing a means of quantifying the arrangement. This in turn allows different arrangements to be compared, and the best compromise accordingly selected. This paper illustrates the use of the tool by application to generic monohull and trimaran configurations, enabling the merits of one to be compared against the other in a quantitative fashion. Conclusions are drawn regarding the value such tools add to the overall design process.