Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
10 Business Experiment Ship Building
Ottmar Kraemer-Fuhrmann, Yona Raekow
10.1 Introduction
10.1.1 The Need of Grid Computing in the Ship Building Industry
Shipyards in Europe cannot compete on price alone against overseas competitors,
especially those who have the benefit of lower labour costs. Therefore, European
ship builders need to concentrate on high-quality construction projects that need
a highly skilled workforce and are specially tailored to the requirements of their
customers. Consequently each ship is a unique product, produced only once or in a
very small type series.
To improve their competitive position, it is essential for modern shipyards to be
able to harness the most advanced simulation and design tools to produce complex
structures cost effectively. The objective is to recognize and reduce the technical and
economical risks that are implicit in large and complex ship building projects. The
vision is the complete virtual design and build of a ship.
Modern ship building is furthermore distributed over several industry sectors.
The direct turnover of the shipyards themselves is only 10-30% of the added value.
The predominant part of the added value is made by suppliers. Thus, a ship is the
result of an intensive collaboration among shipyards and their suppliers, which starts
during the early design phase and continues during the production of a ship. This
Business Experiment applies to all industry sectors that are involved in ship building.
A close collaboration between the suppliers and the shipyard was enabled by the
Ship Design and Integration system (SESIS, http://www.sesis.de) that was devel-
oped in collaboration of Fraunhofer SCAI, the German Aerospace Center (DLR),
the shipyards Flensburger Schiffbau-Gesellschaft (FSG) and Lindenau, the Center
of Maritime Technologies (CMT), the supplier SAM Electronics and the Hamburg
University of Technology (TUHH). Part of the work of the Business Experiment
presented here was to extend SESIS by a Grid interface, in order to enhance the
available collaboration support with easy access to computational power for the
shipyard and its suppliers.
Figure 10.1 shows the time line of the ship building process. Building a ship
takes about 18 months. 85% of the costs are already fixed after 2 months, long
before the actual ship building has started. This implies that the initial design phase
needs to be very accurate, so that miscalculations are impossible. Every mistake in
the initial design phase can become a major problem for the shipyard later on.
The ship building Business Experiment focused on the early design phase of a
ship and illustrated how the ship building industry can benefit from using computing
resources, like Grid or Cloud resources, in order to maximize their revenue while
