The Role of IT in Shipbuilding

摘要

No improvement of products or processes can nowadays be achieved without massive investment in IT technologies. In shipbuilding, the initial design phase should become the main focus of strategic IT development due to the fact that the technical risk is mainly driven by the initial design. To remain in the market means control of technical risk before signing the contract. Ships which are nowadays designed by empirical rules will be designed by first-principle based simulations, simply because cook-book ships do not represent competitive products for European shipyards. IT system design as well as the culture in shipbuilding will have to take this unavoidable change into account. This general trend - combined with the severe pressure from the market - will force specialization, especially in IT development. Universities with their natural ability to create solutions for complex mathematical problems will definitely be back on the scene. The development in total will become more dynamically and complex, and the promising approach to cope with the new flexibility seems to be the open method bank concept. We should never forget that each concept - even the most efficient one - requires highly skilled and well educated people with scientific background. In this respect, the shipbuilding scene might require conceptual re-engineering.