Integrated Multiple Attributive Decision Support System for Producibility Evaluation in Ship Design

Ship design today can be viewed as an ad hoc process. It must be considered in the context of integration with other design development activities, such as production, costing, quality control, and so forth. Otherwise, it is possible for the designer to design a ship that is difficult to produce, requires high material or labor cost, or contains some design flaws that the production engineers have to correct or send back for redesigning before production can be done. Any adjustment required after the design stage will result in a penalty of extra time or cost. Deficiencies in the design of a ship will influence the succeeding stages of production. In addition to designing a ship that fulfills producibility requirements, it is also desirable to design a ship that satisfies risk, performance, cost, and customer requirements criteria. More recently, environmental concerns, safety, passenger comfort, and life-cycle issues are becoming essential parts of the current shipbuilding industry. Therefore, "design for X paradigm" should also be considered during the ship design stages. An integrated multiple attributive decision support system for producibility evaluation in ship design (PRODEVIS) is developed to use by industry and researchers in evaluating the producibility of competing ship designs and design features during the early stages of ship design by taking into account cost, performance, risk, and "design for X paradigm" attributes. This developed approach is a fuzzy multiple attributive group decision-making methodology where feasible design alternatives are conducted by a ship production simulation technique. In this approach, an attribute-based aggregation technique for a heterogeneous group of experts is employed and used for dealing with fuzzy opinion aggregation for the subjective attributes of the ship design evaluation problem. The developed methodology is illustrated with a case study.