Page 33: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (December 1997)

SHIP & BOATBUILDING TECHNOLOGY

CAD/CAM/CIM : Using Today's High-Tech Tools For State-Of-The-Art

Shipbuilding

World-class shipyards and design firms are focusing on how best to use computers in the ship design and production process. The key to their success in areas such as design, factory automation and systems integration is enhanced computer-aided design/computer- aided manufacturing/computer- integrated manufacturing (CAD/CAM/CIM).

CAD/CAM/CIM systems are found in all leading shipyards today. The systems may comprise commercial software such as

FORAN, TRIBON and CATIA, or software that was developed in house, such as HICADEC and

MATES. The application may be for quick-turnaround initial design, one-off production design or the production design of a series of ships. The following paragraphs address selected CAD/CAM/CIM systems in world-class shipyards.

DESIGN

In-House Development/

Series Production

The HICADEC CAD/CAM sys- tem is typically used to support the design and production of series

VLCC and containerships. While

HICADEC is important in the design phase, perhaps its greatest strengths are evident during pro- duction. HICADEC, initially developed by Hitachi Zosen, is used at the Ariake Works, one of the most modern shipyards in

Japan. The system is also in use at

Denmark's Odense Steel Shipyard.

Hitachi Zosen and Odense share ongoing development work and have tailored the system to the individual needs of each yard. At the Ariake Works, HICADEC cur- rently enables detail design and most of production design to be accomplished in seven to eight months between completion of the basic design and first cutting of steel. The production planning (block divisions and fabrication sequence planning) is done inde- pendently.

In-House Development/

One-Off Production

As with HICADEC, Mitsubishi

Heavy Industry (MHI) developed its MATES system in-house.

However, the system is tailored to

December, 1997 one-off designs in support of the yard's business strategy of build- ing one-off rather than series prod- ucts. MATES focuses on the design phase of shipbuilding. Key features of the MATES hull sys- tem, which permits rapid develop- ment of new ship product defini-

Oil Level

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Fuel Tank tions, are the topological modeling capabilities and libraries of para- metric-defined regional structural (Continued on page 35)

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