Productive shipbuilders provide customized or made-to-order products to customers. To date, most of these "world class" companies have succeeded by developing a series of repeatable type blocks, which may be chosen and combined to form products that respond to customer needs. Type blocks have been developed as a result of long experience in customizing ships to specific needs, while maintaining a repeatable build strategy. These are, therefore, empirically based. This paper reports on the early stages of work to develop a theory and methodology for developing type blocks for shipyards that do not currently have them in place and/or lack the historical base from which to extract common blocks. The concept, called Common Generic Block, builds these using the principles of mass customization, a block complexity matrix, grouping using clustering techniques based on production attributes, and applying a threshold value as a stopping criterion for the clustering. This paper describes the general framework of the approach and provides details on the block complexity matrix, used for determining the relative similarity of products to be included in a product family.
