New European Research Project SHIPLYS to Advance Ship Design and Production

The European Commission has granted 6.2 Million Euros for a new research project called SHIPLYS (Ship Lifecycle Software Solutions). The project gathers a team of 12 leading maritime companies and research facilities from several European countries in order to develop simulation and modelling tools that will minimize the time and costs involved in ship design and production.

The main objective of SHIPLYS is to improve the competitiveness of the European shipyards by supporting SME naval architects, shipbuilders and ship-owners to survive in the world market by:

• improving their capability to reduce the time and costs of design and production

• developing the ability to reliably produce better ship concepts through virtual prototyping

• meeting the increasing requirements for LCCA (Life Cycle Cost Analysis), environmental assessments, risk assessments and end-of-life considerations as differentiators

Calculation and modelling tools currently used to overcome these needs are difficult to use and time consuming, especially for SMEs. To address these challenges, SHIPLYS project partners will produce new techniques for quick, reliable multi-disciplinary modelling capability for the marine industry.

The development work in the project applies to two main areas: virtual prototyping and simulation modelling, and the SHIPLYS life cycle suite of tools (called SHIPLYS LCTs) that include LCCA, environmental assessments, risk assessments and multi-criteria decision support modules.

The idea is to develop and integrate rapid virtual prototyping tools with life cycle tools that will be compatible with existing early design software, such as FORAN, Ship Constructor and others. These rapid prototyping tools will be able to establish a model in short timeframe which will bring benefit of investigating multiple alternatives easily and efficiently.

The SHIPLYS consortium is led by TWI Ltd and comprises 12 partners in total, representing different sectors:

• three shipyards: Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd. (UK), Varna Maritime (Bulgaria), Astilleros de Santander SA (Spain)

• an international marine engineering specialist: BMT Group Ltd. (UK) and its operating companies BMT SMART (UK), a vessel performance management systems provider, and BMT Nigel Gee Ltd (UK), a leading independent naval architecture and marine engineering design consultancy.

• two SMEs providing naval architecture and supply chain solutions: as2con-Alveus d.o.o. (Croatia), Atlantec Enterprise Solutions Gmbh. (Germany)

• three Universities: University of Strathclyde (UK), Instituto Superior Tecnico (Portugal), National Technical University of Athens (Greece)

• two industrial R&D institutions: TWI Ltd. (UK), Fundacion Centro Tecnologico Soermar (Spain)

• one standards and validation body: Lloyd’s Register EMEA (UK)