process-centric ship design management framework

As the concept of concurrent engineering has emerged along with support for optimization techniques, lots of endeavors have been made to apply optimization techniques to real design problems for holistic decision-making. Even if the range of design problems to which optimization is applicable has been extended, most ship designs use an iterative and manual approach due to the difficulties of seamless integration of all related design activities. This paper proposes a process-centric management framework for the preliminary ship design process depending on these approaches. Requirements for the framework are generated based on the features of the ship design process first. The proposed framework consists of both process scheduling and process management parts. Each of these modules is divided into submodules, and the modules and their interactions are elaborated to reflect actual design practice. The designed framework is embodied within a workflow system and its usefulness examined through a pilot project.