A real-time assessment of the ship design complexity

The paper introduces an innovative complexity metric for passenger ships taking into account the shape complexity of steel parts, the assembly complexity and the material complexity. The goal is to provide the designer with such information throughout the design process so that an efficient design is obtained at the first design run. Real-time assessment of complexity and quality measurements is rather imperative to ensure efficient and effective optimality search, and to allow real-time adjustment of requirements during the design. Application and validation on a real passenger ship show that the new method is effective in giving a complementary aid to decision process for ship designers.

Research highlights
► Complexity metric as a quality indicator for ship designers.
► Increasing ship complexity will increase production and maintenance costs.
► Model weighting factors calibrated with production time.
► Linear correlation between complexity and production time.