Most maritime products are typically associated with large investments and are seldom built in large series. Where other modes of transport benefit from the economy of series production, this is not the case for maritime products which are typically designed to refined customer requirements increasingly determined by the need for high efficiency, flexibility and low environmental impact at a competitive price. Product design is thus subject to global trade-offs among traditional constraints (customer needs, technical requirements, cost) and new requirements (life-cycle, environmental impact, rules). One of the most important design objectives is to minimize total cost over the economic life cycle of the product, taking into account maintenance, refitting, renewal, manning, recycling, environmental footprint, etc. The trade-off among all these requirements must be assessed and evaluated in the first steps of the design process on the basis of customer / owner specifications. Advanced product design needs to adapt to profound, sometimes contradicting requirements and assure a flexible and optimized performance over the entire life-cycle for varying operational conditions. This calls for greatly improved design tools including multi-objective optimization and finally virtual testing of the overall design and its components. HOLISHIP addresses these urgent industry needs by the development of innovative design methodologies, integrating design requirements (technical constraints, performance indicators, life-cycle cost, environmental impact) at an early design stage and for the entire life-cycle in an integrated design environment. Design integration will be implemented in practice by the development of integrated design s/w platforms and demonstrated by digital mock-ups and industry led application studies on the design and performance of ships, marine equipment and maritime assets in general.

Type of Services/Role:

• Structural design and assessment of a ship, covering the whole life span and different operational requirements.
• Structural design and assessment of ship details for prevention of fatigue and fracture phenomena, employing optimization tools, new materials, geometries, etc.
• Optimization of ship operations considering, quasi-static structural response, dynamic events, fatigue life, etc.