Ontologies in the Marine Domain and Use Cases for Autonomous Vessel Design and Other Novel Designs

Abstract

As the marine industry looks to develop and integrate autonomous vessels and platforms into the global fleet, new design challenges emerge as the complexity of the vessel design process increases in parallel with the growing need for larger and more diversified multi-disciplinary design teams. The design of autonomous vessels presents the need for novel marine designs with the use of diverse skill sets, knowledge sets, and technical backgrounds from the early stages of the design process. In developing novel marine designs, explicit, implicit, and tacit knowledge is needed for the development of successful concepts. Given the novelty and complexity of autonomous vessels, a significant amount of conditional, path dependent tacit knowledge is required in the design process. To form successful designs and to form a foundation for future development of autonomous vessels, it is critical that methods and frameworks be developed to represent, share, and codify necessary tacit knowledge and its interdependencies within system design in explicit form ahead of full product development. To be able to account for the multidimensional relationships that should, could or will exist between design parameters and associated design decisions, a bridge between implicit and tacit knowledge is needed. One approach to bridging the gap between tacit and implicit knowledge is through the shared conceptualization of an ontology. Due to the fact that ontologies can separate concepts and define context-dependent relationships, ontologies have the possibility to enable the understanding of potential design implications associated with integration of the multiple contextual views of design artifacts within a singular framework. This paper will provide a survey of the current uses of ontologies and their possible applications ranging from concept to detailed design across naval design generally and autonomous vessels specifically.