Impact of production requirements on high-quality ship product data models

Rules, standards and regulations have to be observed in every step of the ship design process. Ignoring these constraints in any case leads to higher costs going along with potentially lower product quality. Numerous investigations have shown that product data model correction activities require considerable resources (man-hours and although money=cost) to obtain an acceptable quality level, and in the worst case, a redesign of potentially larger parts of the ship structure has to be performed. Computer-aided design systems offer a large set of functions to define a product data model. However, in the current situation, these tools are not capable to fully ensure the correctness of the product data model while observing the relevant quality criteria which are generally shipyard specific as they are mainly imposed by the production facilities. A quality management system is introduced which is based on the ISO 10303-59 focusing on quality criteria to be applied for an efficient ship structure production process. The functions of the system will be demonstrated on weldability criteria. These criteria demand notches at distinctive constellations of components depending on their function and, for example, minimum distances and angles between structural parts due to welding processes and material requirements. As an additional criterion, sufficient excess material has to be assigned to plate edges functioning as block boundaries to allow for the correction of inaccuracies in the production process at even late stages. The integration of the product data quality management algorithms with the computer-aided design system, in this case AVEVA marine, shows an efficient correction of inapt data as the automatically detected errors can easily be fixed by means of a guided process including the visualization of the structural parts with the help of the computer-aided design system being applied for data modelling.