An understanding of the shipbuilding construction and production issues, and the ability to implement this in ship designs, is key to the successful development of affordable Naval and commercial ships. Modern shipbuilding techniques involve assembling "blocks" that are pre-outfitted prior to actual ship installation. This results in complex design and 3D fabrication scheduling issues requiring efficient communications between the designers and production personnel throughout the ship development. A visualization software application is required that integrates information from various commercial software packages currently used in ship design and construction, and thus facilitates the communication of shipbuilding production concepts without requiring the development of prototypes. The Phase I effort will demonstrate, through the modeling of the ship hull block construction process, the feasibility and potential for the development of a complete visualization application for the shipbuilding process. The demonstration will be accomplished using commercially available software including JSpaceTm, an object-oriented software environment. JSpace will allow the seamless integration of existing shipbuilding data and the implementation of visual navigation, querying, and simulation capabilities to communicate the complex design and shipbuilding concepts. The visualization application will be independent of ship type and be equally applicable to both commercial and naval shipbuilding.
