The future of Shipbuilding

Digitalization and computational tools have great potential to generate value for improving the competitiveness of the EU shipbuilding industry. It requires a significant reshaping of existing tools and practices to be exploited successfully. The gains come in the form of increased quality and reduced time required for design, virtual prototyping, estimations of impacts for the use of greening innovative technologies, modularization, flexible data management, interoperability across proprietary tools, cyber security, efficient support for modern robotized fabrication and openness for integration with operational platforms. The future of shipbuilding lies in s marter use of computational tools.

The purpose of the SEUS Project

The main goal of the Smart European Shipbuilding project (SEUS) is to create a Smart Shipbuilding Framework for European shipyards. This is achieved by architecting and developing an integrated platform for a combined and integrated solution incorporating CAE, CAD, CAM, and PDM software and testing it at shipyards. The new platform solution will be built by the best European shipbuilding expertise provided by academic and industrial consortium participants. It intends to develop novel practices for human-centric knowledge management in shipbuilding, the use of NLP, and data-driven AI design elements in the current consensus or intelligent technologies and Industry 5.0.

Innovation in Action

The SEUS consortium’s ambition represents the potential for improvement in the current traditional shipbuilding value chain via process innovation, namely: human-centred Industry 5.0 needs; open standard and interface for shipbuilding data, AI (e.g., automated routines); integration of CAD/CAE/CAM via a PDM smart platform; 2D-3D modularization and data reuse; MRO from the downstream phases of the shipbuilding value chain included in the smart platform and closing the lifecycle loop. In the long term, our ambition is to achieve considerably time saving in engineering, assembly and construction at European shipyards. Additionally, the minimization of gaps in digital information flows and the optimization of work processes present a large area for time and cost optimization, providing significant economic impacts on shipbuilding.