Modular Conceptual Synthesis of Low-Emission Ships

With the ambition of lowering emission from shipping, today’s ship designers face both the freedom and challenge to select from a large set of different ship system concepts during the conceptual design stage. In order to design competitive vessels, these options need to be assessed in an efficient and systematic way. Building upon established ship design methodologies, this paper presents a combined synthesis model adapted to low-emission ship design. By making extended use of modularity, namely component swapping and combinatorial modularity, the model enables flexibly synthesizing diverse ship configurations. To illustrate how the model can be used, we show how it can be implemented computationally and apply it to a RoRo transport case for the route Rotterdam - Halifax. An efficient discrete event simulation enables immediate performance evaluation. The ship designer can thus directly foresee the consequences of decisions and elucidate requirements on an informed basis.