HOLISHIP receives ​“Blessing” from EU – Commission

The face of ship design is changing. The vastly increas­ing com­plex­ity of European built ships and maritime struc­tures as well as the growing number of rules and reg­u­la­tions call for novel concepts of product design and testing. To address this chal­lenge a team of 40 European maritime industry and research partners[1] has sub­mit­ted the HOLISHIP (HOLIstic opti­mi­sa­tion of SHIP design and oper­a­tion for life cycle) proposal in response to the 2015 Call of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Trans­port Research Programme.

Now the con­sor­tium has been awarded an 11.4 M€ grant to develop the next gen­er­a­tion ship design system for the European maritime industry. HOLISHIP sets out to address urgent problems of today’s ship design and oper­a­tion, focusing on future require­ments by devel­op­ing a holistic approach to ship design capable of meeting tomorrow’s challenges.

Most maritime products are typ­i­cally asso­ci­ated with large invest­ments and are seldom built in large series. Where other modes of trans­port benefit from the economy of series pro­duc­tion, this is not the case for maritime products which are typ­i­cally designed to refined customer require­ments increas­ingly deter­mined by the need for high effi­ciency, flex­i­bil­ity and low envi­ron­men­tal impact at a com­pet­i­tive price. Product design is thus subject to global trade-offs among tra­di­tional con­straints (customer needs, tech­ni­cal require­ments, cost) and new require­ments (life-cycle, envi­ron­men­tal impact, rules). One of the most impor­tant design objec­tives is to minimise total cost over the economic life cycle of the product, taking into account main­te­nance, refit­ting, renewal, manning, recy­cling, envi­ron­men­tal foot­print, etc. The trade-off among all these require­ments must be assessed and eval­u­ated in the first steps of the design process on the basis of customer / owner specifications.

Advanced product design needs to adapt to profound, some­times con­tra­dict­ing require­ments and assure a flexible and opti­mized per­for­mance over the entire life-cycle for varying oper­a­tional con­di­tions. This calls for greatly improved design tools includ­ing multi-objec­tive opti­miza­tion and finally virtual testing of the overall design and its com­po­nents. HOLISHIP addresses these urgent industry needs by the devel­op­ment of inno­v­a­tive design method­olo­gies, com­bin­ing design require­ments (tech­ni­cal con­straints, per­for­mance indi­ca­tors, life-cycle cost, envi­ron­men­tal impact) at an early design stage and for the entire life-cycle in an inte­grated design envi­ron­ment. Design inte­gra­tion will be imple­mented in practice by the devel­op­ment of inte­grated design s/​w plat­forms and demon­strated by digital mock-ups and a large range of industry led appli­ca­tion studies on the design and per­for­mance of ships maritime structures. 

HOLISHIP will start in Sep­tem­ber 2016 with a duration of 4 years. More detailed infor­ma­tion will be avail­able in due time through the project’s ded­i­cated web site at www.holiship.eu. First back­ground infor­ma­tion will be avail­able at the coordinator’s site: www.hsva.de/our-research/ship-design/HOLISHIP.html . 

HOLISHIP will be funded by the European Com­mis­sion in the HORIZON 2020 Trans­port Pro­gramme. [1] HSVA (coor­di­na­tor), ALS Marine, AVEVA, BALANCE, Bureau Veritas, Cetena, CMT, CNR, Damen, Danaos, DCNS, DLR, DNVGL, Elomatic, Epsilon, FhG-AGP, Fin­cantieri, FRIEND­SHIP SYSTEMS, HSB, IRT SystemX, ISL, Lloyds Register, MARIN, Marintek, Meyer Werft, Navantia, NTUA-SDL, RR-AS, RR-PE, Sirehna, SMILE FEM, Starbulk, TNO, TRITEC, Uljanik, Univ. Genoa, Univ. Liege, Univ. Strath­clyde, van der Velde