Page 294 - Practical Design Ships and Floating Structures

Practical Design of Ships and Other Floating Structures 269
You-Sheng Wu, Wei-Cheng Cui and Guo-Jun Zhou (Eds)
0 2001 Elsevicr Science Ltd. All rights reserved

INTEGRATION OF FIRST-PRINCIPLE APPROACHES
TO DESIGN FOR DAMAGE SURVIVABILITY

D. Konovessis' and D. Vassalos'

' The Ship Stability Research Centre, Department of Ship and Marine Technology,
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G1 IXN, UK

ABSTRACT

The paper elaborates on the development of a procedure for accommodating damage survivability in
the ship design process cost-effectively. For passenger Ro-Ro vessels, damage survivability
considerations make sense only when adequate subdivision criteria have been satisfied whilst allowing
for other design considerations. The paper highlights and demonstrates that a ship design process
could not possibly be optimal without involving the designer and hence any attempt to develop a fully
automated procedure will be futile. The paper focuses on the development of the objective function,
on thc design parameters and on the integration of first-principles approaches, notably suitable
Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) frameworks, to be included within the design for survivability
optimisation process.

KEYWORDS
Design, Optimisation, First-Principles, Survivability, Quantitative Risk Assessment

1 INTRODUCTION

The approaches that can be deployed to allow for integration of safety considerations in the ship design
process vary according to the stage the process has reached and the specific criteria compliance is
sought for. A holistic approach should integrate the various methods available, taking into account the
fact that the design information available at the initial phases of the design process is by no means
complete or accurate and that as the process develops the quantity and quality of information increases,
thus allowing for design assessment and analysis using advanced tools and techniques, until
convergence is reached.

It should be highlighted, that the latter only reflects a physical demand, Le. assessment at any stage of
a process can only be based on the information available. The sequential nature of the well-known and
established ship design spiral is no longer an issue to adhere to, given the technological advances of
the last decade, particularly in computer science, for example work on distributed computer systems.
However, in the every-day ship design practice, this sequential approach has been replaced by groups