Page 17: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (April 2006)

April 2006 17

While AVEVA may still be an unfa- miliar name to some in the shipbuilding world, the Cambridge, England-based company is one of the industry's fastest- growing lifecycle engineering IT solu- tions and services providers, with a long history serving the offshore oil and gas markets, among others. In May 2004 the company completed its acquisition of

Tribon Solutions for $34.2 million, effectively setting its course toward becoming a force in the shipbuilding business.

At the time of the acquisition,

Richard Longdon, CEO, AVEVA

Group, said, "In terms of market share, technology and breadth of proposition

Tribon is the world's leading solution provider for ship design and construc- tion. Combined with AVEVA's solid product evolution, its history of innova- tion and its performance in the power, offshore and process industries; we now present the world with its greatest and most powerful engineering IT proposi- tion." Fast forward nearly two years, and the vision is becoming a reality, as

AVEVA rapidly expands its position among some of the world's leading ship- builders, while making significant progress in expanding its position in the burgeoning Chinese market.

AVEVA Vantage Marine 11.6

Last year the company launched

Vantage Marine 11.6, its first solution that brought together the company's flagship PDMS technology with that of

Tribon, for shipbuilding and offshore design and production. The PDMS, or

Plant Design Management System, is a data centric, multi-disciplinary solution for 3D process plant design featuring applications and reference data for every engineering discipline. It differs from conventional 3D approaches by not requiring a drawing engine, but pro- ducing graphics directly from a single, coherent data model of the entire plant.

VANTAGE Marine 11.6 (coinciding with the 11.6 release of PDMS) is an advanced solution for shipbuilding and offshore design and production.

While the Tribon name has been a familiar one to shipbuilders, AVEVA's

PDMS is a familiar solution for outfit- ting, and has been used for over 80 per- cent of all new offshore projects in the last 10 years, according to the company.

VANTAGE Marine 11.6 brings the two systems together, and Longdon explained the synergy. "The heyday of mammoth, static oil platforms is all but over and the world is looking to

Floating Production, Storage and

Offloading (FPSO) vessels and other floating facilities for the future of oil production. They are a fusion of ship- building and plant technology, requiring an integration of both technologies."

Design and Production Benefits

The VANTAGE Marine 11.6 system is designed to save time and money in some of the most important phases of the shipbuilding process, allowing work in parallel, both internally as well as externally, due to VANTAGE Marine's coordination capabilities.

The data from all structural and outfit- ting disciplines required to define a complete design and its production information, are stored in one and the same Ship Model database. The close association between the hull and the outfitting data allows the hull structure and outfit designers to work in parallel, sharing the most up-to-date information during design development and produc- ing well-integrated, clash-free final arrangements with all hull penetrations and supports defined.

With VANTAGE Marine 11.6, a new concept for definition of parametric hull structures was introduced. It is a devel- opment of the already existing

Reference Surface Objects (RSOs) to which now information about plating and stiffening can be added. This infor- mation is in the form of parameters that form a "recipe" for how steel panels will be automatically generated from the

RSOs. The recipes can be created via the ordinary interactive user interface of

Circle 235 on Reader Service Card

AVEVA: Making a Name in Shipbuilding

Richard Longdon, CEO

Profile

MR APRIL2006 #3 (17-24).qxd 4/3/2006 11:22 AM Page 17