Zonal ship design

Modern ships typically have a number of distributed systems. Distributed systems are used because it's simpler, cheaper, and better to centrally produce a commodity such as electricity or chill water, than to locally produce it with the users of the commodity. For naval warships, in addition to cost, two measures of performance are very important: Survivability and quality of service. Survivability relates to the ability of the distributed system, even when potentially damaged by a threat, to support the ship's ability to continue fulfilling its missions to the degree planned for the particular threat. Quality of service measures the ability of the distributed systems to support the normal, undamaged operation of its loads. This paper defines a number of key terms, details a number of different zonal architectures, describes the situations where the architectures are best suited and proposes a framework for zonal ship design that promises to satisfy survivability performance requirements and quality of service requirements.