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sites, either at the shipyard or at the supplier engineering company. The Business
Experiment therefore integrated the utility computing services of an IT service
provider into the ship design and simulation process.
The simulation of fire safety of the new component technology is an example
of how the shipyards can benefit from simulation in general. There are many more
simulations that need to be run before a ship can go to production or before the ship-
yard can make a successful bid on a tender.
10.1.2 The Business and Technical Goals of the Business Experiment
From a business point of view this Business Experiment had three objectives. First
the shipyard and its suppliers were equipped with a technology that allowed them
to make use of computational power that is not available at their sites. Access to
computational power helps the ship building industry to minimize risks that are
introduced in the early design phase and to better calculate and estimate costs. This
is particularly important when the shipyard is bidding on fixed price tenders, since
the proposals they make need to be sound and later on implementable within the
proposed budget.
Second the Business Experiment deployed the collaboration platform SESIS
and hence enabled the close collaboration between the suppliers and the shipyard.
Last but not least, the Business Experiment allows IT service providers to enter a
new market segment. It is expected that the result of the experiment will not only be
of interest to the ship building industry, but also to other sectors, e.g. the automobile
industry and the aircraft industry. IT service providers will win new customers from
the engineering community. In particular, engineering companies that require high
computational power only during a short period of time might be interested in using
the kind of on-demand services provided by an IT service provider.
In terms of potential, the market is huge, especially due to the imposed time
constraints of the early design phase. As an example we note that the achievable cost
savings with respect to fuel efficiency (due to better design) could exceed 1 billion
dollar per year for European based shipping companies. We estimate that with large
scale numerical simulations of the interaction of hull, ship propeller and rudder
it is feasible to increase fuel efficiency by 2-4%. If we assume a ship life-time of
25 years, 200 days of operations per year, 100 tons of fuel consumption per day, a
fuel price of ca. 400 dollars per ton (ship diesel) and a construction of 200 ships per
year in Europe. In total this sums up to cost savings of 1.6-3.2 billion dollars per
year - calculated with current fuel prices. Since fuel efficiency only addresses one
aspect of the required simulations in the early design phase, we estimate the sum of
the potential benefits to be much higher. If so, the market must be bigger too.
From a technical point of view the goal of this Business Experiment was to
provide a technical solution that facilitates and accelerates the early design process
in ship building. The solution enables shipyards and suppliers to exchange results
and data in an easy and efficient manner. The collaboration platform that was
deployed at the shipyards and the suppliers allows close cooperation and provides
an easy workflow when combining specialized software available at different sites
