The Application Of Database Technologies To The Midship Structure Design

Midship section design is a vital step among ship's design. This section endures most bending load, and materializes the structure of the whole ship. Therefore, the work in this part must be treated seriously and particularly.During the process of the midship section design, drawing and calculating are carried through crossly; moreover, with the development of this step, design of detailed structures would be deepened continuously. So drawing and calculating of the midship structure must be modificated again and again, until the perfect consistence between the data and graph is realized.Because of such a great deal of reiteration, designers have to deal with many unnecessary troubles. Thereby, a mass of manpower and material resources are wasted in this step. Even at today, when computer-aided drawing has replaced manuel drawing entirely, this condition still doesn't be changed effectively. The reason is that in the most of designing and constructing units, computer is only looked upon as an "electric board," nearly all of the information related to the geometric elements must be saved by another system. That means data and graph are divided completely.Author noticed that these days, many researches about the design of midship section are focused on the scantling of the component in the preliminary design phase. However, the detail design is "ignored" by most of researchers. In fact, a great deal of energy are used in the repeating modifications. Because the data and graph are kept respectively, it is very difficult to find the geometric topology and dimension- restrain information between the components. Then, the direct result is that even a specific modification would lead to a large-scale change. Aimed at the praxis, in this paper, the center -gravity of research is placed on how to link the data and graph. Actually, it is a kind of parametric idea, but the key is how to realized it.After laborious research, Author decided to choose SQL Server 7.0(the data base) to keep all the data. Then, use VB to develop a DBMS to manage these data, and construct an interface between VB and AutoCAD 2000. So, it ispossible to control the data and graph at the same time.The thesis has developed an application program on the platform of AutoCAD 2000. Maybe, now it is not suitable to call it "software"; however, if others were willing to continue this research, authors would appreciated it very much.