Introduction

The general arrangement plan is the central coordination and planning platform in the ship design process. Especially in the early phases of the ship design, the information transport between the parties involved in the design takes place almost exclusively via the general plan. Until now, the general arrangement plan was created with 2D drawing tools. However, a 3D representation of the general arrangement has the advantage that geometric information is available with high precision. This information is of great importance for all tasks in the early design. The preparation of a 3D representation of the general plan is currently not carried out in practice because of the high modelling effort in the early design.

Requisite

This research project analyses the function and the information content of the general plan. Based on these results and further requirements, a product coordination and planning tool is developed based on a 3D general arrangement plan. In addition to the pure geometric information all related product data should be included and made accessible to all parties involved. One of the most important constraints is that the creation of the 3D general arrangement plan must stay in the same time horizon as the well-tried process based on the 2D general arrangement plan. Special attention was paid to the modelling methods and tools used.

3D-General Arrangement Plan

In order to achieve these goals, a modular system architecture was developed based on an efficient 3D CAD tool as well as an external PDM system. These two components form the core module in which the product data is recorded and displayed. Additional tasks / tools can extract all necessary information from this module via interfaces. Centralized data management eliminates the use of outdated data. It also ensures that all parties involved uses the same data.