SMART DIGITAL SHIPYARDS WITH MODEL-BASED MANUFACTURING

Abstract

The biggest challenge for shipyards is to deliver on time and with the expected quality. Each day of delay can cost shipyards up to one million dollars. With small margins, less than 2% on average for the 50 biggest Shipyards WW, shipyards can easily end up losing money. In addition, ships are becoming a lot more complex. This is due to the technological advancements imposed by mandated customer experiences and environmental requirements. By 2050, there are lots of new regulations for emissions shipping and neutral carbon policies. This creates challenges for Korea to produce more complex ships and for China to move from volume production of low value ships to volume production of complex ships. This is good news for Smart Digital Shipyards transformation, this is because Smart Digital Shipyard Transformation is essential for managing complexity and large volumes. Smart Digital Shipyards covers a huge portion of the life cycle of shipbuilding. From requirements to digital manufacturing, to manufacturing execution. Model-based manufacturing will ensure all the information required for shipbuilding will be available in a unified model within a collaborative platform. This will seamlessly support all the manufacturing processes without having to go through non-value add activities. Until today, many shipbuilders still use disjointed primitive tools to manage sophisticated processes. Tools such as Excel spreadsheets as well as lists and 2D drawings printed on paper. Production teams manage warehouses with tools developed over a decade ago. Shipbuilders also address production issues inefficiently – they often rack up a significant amount of additional work hours, going beyond the agreed project timeline and incurring massive extra costs. In the past, this approach may have been acceptable, but today’s environment is less forgiving. This paper introduces the major transformation undergoing at some leading shipyards, by replacing the traditional document-based processes with a model-based manufacturing approach, leveraging ship virtual twins from design to production, achieving a strategic move towards “Smart Digital Shipyards”.