Knowledge Based Engineering Approach To Support Ship Structure Design

In order to face the increasing competition of ship design industry, shipyards have to pursue the goal of reducing the cycle of ship design and construction and improving product quality. The information of design specifications changes and increases continually. Besides, shipyards have accumulated a great amount of data, information, technology and experience, all of which are important knowledge assets. During the times of knowledge economy, how to apply design knowledge in ship design process to increase the added value of knowledge is the key to keep leading edge as well as to survive in the fierce market competition for ship design and construction company. To develop suitable tools to use these knowledge effectively is urgent need in practice. So how to apply knowledge effectively through advanced knowledge–based engineering technology to assist and promote ship design work, improve ship design quality, and enhance the shipyard competitiveness and innovation is the hot research issue in ship industry.How to apply the knowledge-based engineering for ship structure design process is studied in this paper, the main work is as follows:1. Present a knowledge-based engineering approach for ship node components intelligent design.In Tribon system, the node components design and modeling over depends on clients'knowledge and experience. A huge number of node components in ship structure and interactive modeling operations in Tribon result in lots of repetitive modeling operations and design and modeling inefficient. The problem caused by the above descriptions can be effectively solved by knowledge-based engineering technology. The work studies the method of creation of node components library. Applying ship design specifications, standards and experts experience to construct knowledge base, which will provide user design information tips and recommend the type and size parameters of node components, check whether the dimension meet the design specifications, display test results, automatically search for and ascertain node components modeling location, complete the node components design modeling intelligently.2. Propose application of knowledge-based engineering method to assist ship structure initial design.The problems of domestic initial design process of ship structure making the design efficiency low and knowledge reuse abilities poor, considering which the advanced technology of knowledge-based engineering is proposed and applied. It can improve the ship design process, assisting users to refer to classification society laws and regulations, design standard and expertise through knowledge base system during the initial design process, strengthening the integration of design knowledge, reducing the workload of repeated modifications and improve the products quality in the process of ship structural design and modeling.3. Application of knowledge-based engineering approach to ship structure optimization design.There are some challenging problems in complex ship structure optimization process. such as, multidisciplinary knowledge, huge complex calculations and how to apply the different disciplines knowledge effectively to form a integrated design calculation. Lots of hot research focused on the optimization algorithm development at home and abroad. However, it ignores the application of accumulated mother ship data, expert experience in structure optimization design process. This work presents the application of knowledge-based engineering approach for ship structure optimization design, which use expertise, national design standard, design regulation to construct design knowledge base in structure optimization process. At the same time, combination of simulation technology and structure optimization design technology is used for product design process to reduce the product's design and development costs. Structure optimization technology offers simulation technology a variety reference design meeting constrains requirements and simulation technology real-time checks the feasibility of optimal design.This work studies the method of knowledge-based engineering for ship node structure design and ship structure initial design process. It can improve the ship structure design process and apply design regulations, standards, expertise to construct knowledge base through knowledge-based engineering technology, which can assist clients to do ship structure design. Besides, it presents application of knowledge-based engineering approach to ship structure optimization design. It uses diversified knowledge to construt knowledge base system, standard profile library and plate library through knowledge-based engineering technology, which can transform structure simulation model into structure optimization mathematical model. With the help of knowledge base, different source of design knowledge can be accesed in and correct strategy is used to promote design ability, providing a shortcut for less experienced designers, improving design work efficiency. What is more, designers can accumulate design experience rapidly, and make the computer technology and expertise integrated effectively.