Abstract
The traditional design process has been developed, through time, by trial and error, following an evolutive approach. By following this procedure,
the design team focused its attention on only one conceptual design alternative at a time, which is perfected step by step until the expected
outcome is obtained. Nevertheless nowadays, due to the high complexity of ships and increasingly stringent operational requirements, this
approach appears to be obsolete in a market where cost and time reduction is a fundamental parameter. Indeed, to be competitive in the
shipbuilding market, very accurate information should be available since the beginning of the process, to allow the design team a 360-degree
exploration of a high number of alternatives and then identify the best design solution in no time.
In this paper a new, rational, design process, necessary to raise efficiency and effectiveness of ship design, is presented. By using a multi-purpose
design software, the authors were able to create a Virtual Prototype of a case study ship with ease and little training, obtaining, since early-stage
design phases, some outputs of interest (such as longitudinally weight distribution of ship structures, preliminary midship section, GZ curves and
powering curves) without great computational efforts. The most important benefit of using only one multipurpose software instead of multiple
specific ones lies in the elimination of remarking activities for switching from one software to another, reducing loss of data’s risks during the
process.
