During the early stages of ship design a set of design requirements needs to be selected, accounting for both financial and technical feasibility, and operational effectiveness. This process of requirements elucidation creates a need for information regarding the various design alternatives and their effect on the feasibility and effectiveness of the design requirements. Therefore various methods have been developed to support a naval architect. However, when one considers an internal layout and process driven ships, ships where the arrangement of spaces aboard has a strong influence on the effectiveness of the ship's operational processes, a gap in available methods have been identified. This paper proposes a method based on queueing networks that allows a naval architect to develop a model to study the effects of different arrangements on the execution of various sets of operational processes in a ship. Using this model a better understanding of the interaction and the interdependencies between the ship's arrangement and it's operational processes can be obtained. This understanding will eventually improve the requirements elucidation process and lead to the development of better sets of design requirements.
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