The modeling and exploration of ship systems in the early stages of decision-based design

From the practical needs of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) in particular, the issue of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of designers in the early stages of designing is addressed. The specific focus is support for the development of top-level specifications and ship characteristics in the typical RAN ship acquisition process.; For improvement, a paradigm shift needs to occur, from a traditional and essentially sequential ship design spiral approach towards a holistic and concurrent systems approach. This represents a departure from a process that develops singular point designs towards a process that facilitates rapid prototyping and concept exploration. Foundational is the philosophy that an appropriate modern approach to designing is one that is based on systems thinking, uses computers as partners in the process of design and includes concurrent engineering design for the life cycle.; It is asserted that design is a satisficing decision-based activity. From this perspective, the culture of the Decision Support Problem Technique has been called on and contributed to in this dissertation. The work reported has relevance to both Operations Research and design science.; The capstone of the work is a light-patrol frigate case study which traces descriptively a prescriptive design process. Employed is an integrated application of design and Operations Research based tools leading to an improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of human designers in the early stages of designing. Using as a core construct, the compromise DSP, the ability to explore a design space to quantitatively and qualitatively establish trends and a satisficing space is demonstrated.