SBIR-STTR Award

Design for producability is the key to reducing ship construction costs. The most direct way to ensure that design for producability goals are met is to automate portions of the design process, enforcing producability requirements in software. Industrial Planning Technology Inc has developed an automated design and planning technology that is based on the use of high fidelity fabrication and assembly simulators. This technology yields lower construction costs than traditional rule-based design for producability, and does not require the development of comprehensive design rules. Distribution systems (piping, cabling, HVAC) represent between 25% and 40% of the construction cost for Naval ships. This proposal will explore the feasibility of developing an automatic design for producability tool which couples an automatic 3D spatial router for ship piping, cabling, and HVAC with IPT's construction planning and simulation tools. The benefits of this approach are lower construction cost through optimized design for producability, and reduced design costs. The technology would be packaged as a plug-in to existing commercial ship design systems. Benefit Anticipated savings are $15 million per year in construction costs and $1 million per year in design costs for U.S. shipyards. This assumes that 3% of piping fabrication work is moved from in-dock and in-module on-site fabrication to mechanized shop fabrication as a result of deploying the tools developed in this project. Keywords Design, Simulation, Shipbuilding, manufacturing, producability, Software, piping

Design for producability is the key to reducing ship construction costs. The most direct way to ensure that design for producability goals are met is to automate portions of the design process, enforcing producability requirements in software. Industrial Planning Technology Inc has developed an automated design and planning technology that is based on the use of high fidelity fabrication and assembly simulators. This technology yields lower construction costs than traditional rule-based design for producability, and does not require the development of comprehensive design rules. Distribution systems (piping, cabling, HVAC) represent between 25% and 40% of the construction cost for Naval ships. This project has established the feasibility of developing an automatic design for producability/maintainability tool, which couples an automatic 3D spatial router for ship piping, cabling, and HVAC with Industrial Planning Technology's construction planning and simulation tools. The benefits of this approach are lower construction cost through optimized design for producability, reduced design costs, and lower total cost of ownership through automated design for maintainability. The technology would be packaged as a plug-in to existing commercial ship design systems. Benefit Anticipated savings are $13 million per year in construction and design costs per year for U.S. shipyards, and $1.1 billion dollars in total life cycle savings for Navy programs over the next 50 years. Keywords Shipbuilding, Software, Routing, PRODUCTION, Cabling, Simulation, piping, HVAC