The National Shipbuilding Research Proceedings of the IREAPS Technical Symp. Paper No. 44. An Integration Approach to Computer Aided Design Systems for Ship Design

The use of Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools has become increasingly common in the ship design and manufacturing industries over the last decade. These tools have often evolved from small individual efforts developed by one or two engineers into major programs on which large portions of the ship design effort depend. In many cases the management of the computer system has not kept pace with the evolution of the software. This paper describes an approach taken to the development of computer systems to minimize some of the resulting problems. The underlying premise is that the objective of the system is to increase the overall productivity of the organization instead of the productivity of any single technical discipline. The conclusions reached were that more consideration should be given to the data storage, management and communication capabilities of current computers by the ship design organizations in addition to the effort of developing design or analysis programs. The conceptual system design that resulted from applying this approach to a particular organization is presented along with a description of the first software item implementing this concept.