Page 310 - Practical Design Ships and Floating Structures

Practical Design of Ships and Other Floating Structures 285
You-Sheng Wu, Wei-Cheng Cui and Guo-Jun Zhou (Eds)
0 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

THE APPLICATION OF A DECOMPOSITION AND REUSE
APPROACH IN MARINE DESIGN

K. G. Tan' and P. Sen2
I Engineering Design Centre, Newcastle University,
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK
Department of Marine Technology, Newcastle University,
Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK

ABSTRACT

Decomposition and reuse are two practical approaches that could assist the solution of large marine
design problems. Design Reuse has always been regarded as an attractive approach by marine
designers, although the complexity of the problem and the relative novelty of individual designs do not
always allow efficient application of design reuse paradigms. This paper discusses a decomposition
and reuse approach in marine design. A well-known decomposition paradigm is used which allows
identification of weakly connected model substructures that naturally exist within a design problem
and permits the division of the overall design problem into subproblems in accordance with these sub-
structures. The reuse concept proposed in this paper is based on the reuse of design data. The aim is
see how the designer can use existing design data as the basis for future designs without necessarily
having to know how the data was derived, and without explicitly using iterative mathematical
procedures.

KEYWORDS

Design decomposition, Reuse of design data, Multiobjective optimisation, Response surface.

1 INTRODUCTION
Marine design is a complex process which usually involves a multidisciplinary team of designers
working on thousands of design variables. Designing of a new marine product therefore often requires
the designer to decompose the overall design problem into a number of design tasks, so that a complex
design problem is often broken down into a numberof smaller, manageable design subproblems, in a
divide-and-conquer manna, to deal with the complexity of the design task. This apporach often
permits the reuse of past design data and knowledge in the decomposed domains. It is not surprising
therefore that interest in design reuse have always been manifest in designers in all fields
(Sivaloganathan and Shahin 1999).