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to innovate. In the early 1990s, all prod- ucts were re-written to move from the

DOS operating environment to Windows.

Further, the products have undergone con- tinuous improvement, taking advantage of increased computing power available in

PCs, and more advanced programming tools. Finally, ASC has further proved its commitment to making the vessel design and construction process easier by inte- grating with third party software.

Today, the Autoship CADCAM suite is as follows: • Autoship - for surface modeling. The

Autoship program uses Non-Uniform

Rational B-Spline (NURBS) mathemat- ics, the high-end CAD standard for sur- face modeling. Autopower - for resistance and pow- ering prediction. Twelve independent resistance and propulsion methods for variety of hull forms are offered. Autohydro - for stability and strength calculations. The program performs dam- age and intact stability analyses on a 3D model of the vessel. The program input can either be an Autoship-generated model, or a table of offsets. Autostructure - for internal structure design. This is a group of programs con- sisting of: Project Manager - for project management, Autostructure - for design work, and Report Manager - for report generation. Autostructure is built on top of the Microsoft SQL Server database Autoplate - for plate design and expansion. The program performs plate expansion calculations for both devel- opable and non-developable plates. It helps in the layout and forming of the shell plating. It is based on a modern pro- prietary expansion algorithm. Production Manager - for nesting and stock management. The foundation of

Production Manager is the Autostructure database. Parts for nesting are read from the database; nestings and inventories are stored in it. Production Manager exports nesting drawings and tables into Auto-

CAD.

Third Party Integration

In today's shipyard, there are many dif- ferent software packages in use. The indi- vidual software alone may improve effi- ciencies within a given department, how- ever the real benefit of these disparate packages can only be realized through meaningful data transfers between these systems. Ultimately, the supply chain will still experience bottlenecks if these links 26 • MarineNews January, 2005

Vessel Design

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