4. Application of Advanced Information Technology, and Enhancement of Productivity and Reliability
To transform the traditional labor-intensive shipbuilding into an advanced and modern industry, the development of computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) technology was started in 1987 as a joint academic-industrial project. This CIM technology is intended for integrated management under unitary computer control of all aspects of shipbuilding from information handling to design, material machining, assembly and construction and, as illustrated in Fig. 1 (Flow of CIM Project and ZoHaku Web), it began to be applied in actual shipyards from about 1993.
Another developmental project geared to an even more advanced level was organized and launched in 1997, and completed in 1999, with its fruits now finding their way into actual shipyard operation.
At the same time, since shipbuilding is an assembling industry which buys many products of ship machinery manufacturers and integrates them into a system taking the form of a ship, the ZoHaku Web Project, incorporating the so-called CALS / EC concept, has been carried out since 1998, and is now in its final year and conclusive stage.
4-1 Optimization of Design and Production
The current state of the application of information technology to ship designing and construction is summarized in this section.
The development of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in recent years has resulted in enhanced reliability and practical usefulness of the computation of fluid flows around the hull, thereby making such computation a powerful tool for developing a new hull form design. A two-year research project aiming at automated hull form designing by combining the CFD code with optimization algorithms was completed in 2000. This implies the replacement of the traditional empirical hull form designing procedure with a CFD-based automatic process, which constitutes an important part of an integrated CFD-CAD-CIM system of ship designing.
The application of CIM is resulting in redefinition of the function of the ship design department from its traditional role of preparing design drawings and leaving their embodying to downstream stages to a new role of inputting design information to a product model embracing all pertinent information required in the whole process from designing to construction. Following this input from the design department, the production department inputs production information to machining and assembling procedures and schedules pertaining to materials machining, assembling and construction, and the input data are immediately fed back to the design department, thereby enabling the designers to optimize the design, taking account of the production stage as well.
If and when the ZoHaku Web, to be elaborated upon else-where in this article, is realized, the exchange of design information with marine machinery and parts manufacturers will also be digitized for improved exchange efficiency, and the marine machinery information supplied from them are also incorporated into the product model and placed under unitary management to facilitate optimization.
