Virtual integration: managing complex warship design through model based engineering

Modern warships have become increasingly complex systems, capable of performing a variety of roles, in demanding environments whilst under the presence of a military threat. As the complexity of warships has increased, so too have the systems and processes established to design and manufacture them. Warship designers have become systems engineers charged with delivering integrated products often within programmes constrained by cost, risk, resource and commercial construct.

For centuries, if not millennia, models have been an essential component of the warship design process providing a contextual reference for what the finished product may look like and how it may perform. Traditionally, these models have focussed on the physical performance attributes of the warship, its hull-form, its length, beam and displacement, its propulsion system and its likely payload; in unison these models provide an early understanding of key characteristics such as range, speed, complement and sea-keeping. However, with the reduction of ships’ companies and the proliferation of increasingly complex software-based control systems, coupled with a backdrop of squeezed defence budgets/development timescales, the call upon models to help manage and de-risk such complexity is becoming prevalent.

Across the industrial landscape, model based systems engineering, architectural frameworks and the Systems Modelling Language have become common tools within the systems engineer’s arsenal as a means for managing system complexity and mitigating system integration risk. Within the warship design domain, the use of model based systems engineering has been most widely deployed by combat system designers, largely in recognition of the software based nature of these systems. This paper discusses how such approaches are equally applicable to the wider warship design and manufacture process – notably the development of Marine and Platform Systems; it describes the deployment of model based engineering and the Systems Modelling Language to de-risk modern warship design. It presents an overarching modelling framework and corresponding design methodology that can be deployed in concert with the more traditional modelling techniques used in warship design, to more effectively reduce risk and manage whole-ship integration.