Business process management-based job assignment in ship hull production design

As a part of the IT convergence in the shipbuilding industry, we examine the adoption of business process management (BPM) for the ship hull production design process. Ship hull production design, which is a process-based task, requires the most man-hours (M/H) among all ship design processes and is directly coupled with ship production, whereby improvements in this task can provide large contributions to enhancing productivity. Thus, we analyze the hull production design task from the perspective of the business process to generate BPM models for a manager and design engineers. Particularly for the manager process, we implement the optimal assignment method as a part of the decision support system to help the manager efficiently assign hull blocks to design engineers in the BPM system (BPMS). In this paper, we suggest the concepts of the block standard design M/H and variable design M/H for the assignment problem. We compute the estimated M/H by using models developed after this concept. To minimize the total required M/H of assignments for the production design, we adopt the Hungarian algorithm. The BPM executable model of the hull production design process is implemented using Bonita Open-Solution 5.7, which is a representative open-source BPMS.