Over the past year and a half, five participating shipyards have been preparing labor time standards using MOST Computer Systems on a time sharing basis. The result has been the development of separate databases covering the following operating areas: blast and paint--platen and dock areas; Electrical--shop and outfitting; main assembly; fabrication shop; and staging erection and teardown--platen, dock and ways. The ability to transfer data from one yard to another is discussed, as well as the methodology for such transfer. The actual use of transferred data and its application is covered to the extent that it has occurred up to the date of the symposium.

Proceedings of the REAPS Technical Symposium. Paper No. 25: Integrating Shipyard Design and Manufacturing Functions into an Existing CAD/CAM System.

The use of Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools has become increasingly common in the ship design and manufacturing industries over the last decade. These tools have often evolved from small individual efforts developed by one or two engineers into major programs on which large portions of the ship design effort depend. In many cases the management of the computer system has not kept pace with the evolution of the software. This paper describes an approach taken to the development of computer systems to minimize some of the resulting problems. The underlying premise is that the objective of the system is to increase the overall productivity of the organization instead of the productivity of any single technical discipline. The conclusions reached were that more consideration should be given to the data storage, management and communication capabilities of current computers by the ship design organizations in addition to the effort of developing design or analysis programs. The conceptual system design that resulted from applying this approach to a particular organization is presented along with a description of the first software item implementing this concept.

The computerized programs for piping system evolution: 1. provided pipe bending data for length, bend angles, roll engles and distance between bends, 2. added fitting, valve, and hanger locations to both bent and straight pipe by match marking and creating pipe details, 3. combined details into assemblies, 4. generated isometric and orthographic drawings, 5. added welding identification and data, 6. extracted and added material information, 7. expanded to include work authorizations, trade work instructions, feed relationships, test boundaries, and serialization, and 8. generated tapes for data transfer to work authorization files and reports for manufacturing and installation.

With shipbuilding capacity worldwide well in excess of demand and competition for orders extremely fierce, shipyards must ensure that all resources are used effectively. Each man on the shop floor, each foreman and manager must be able to carry out the work required of him - which means that he must be provided with all the required information on the work to be done and the means to carry it out. The competition for orders, quite apart from resulting in shorter lead times, has resulted in shipyards building a wider range of products than was envisaged even a short time ago. The potential. variety of individual operations within a shipyard in this situation is much higher than in the case of a single product facility. The information channels used in this production system are similarly going to require greater capacity, speed and accuracy. SPCS is a flexible and uncomplicated approach to production control, aiming to supplement management rather than to replace management decision making by black-box decision rules. It consists of a set of inter-tied modules, each of which is executed either manually or by batch computer processing or on-line, depending on local circumstances.

Proceedings of the REAPS Technical Symposium. Paper No. 22: Design for Production. The traditional role of the Ship Designer is the preparation of an overall design of vessel which will have a performance satisfying the owner's Statement of Requirements. The concept of Design for Production, however, requires that, in satisfying the Statement of Requirement, the Ship Designer should also give attention to ease of production. This suggests, therefore, two aspects of the overall design, namely: design for performance design for production and there are others, not considered here, such as design for repair and maintenance, and ergonomic design. Clearly, there will be areas of inter-action and the role of the Ship Designer could be seen in this context as one of arbiter, having the ultimate responsibility of deciding whether performance or production considerations should take precedence in any particular case or the nature of the compromise to be reached. Many of the procedures necessary involve consideration of every feature of the ship from the overall viewpoint. Any tendency to divide design into the traditional elements of steelwork, outfit, engineering and piping would provide a totally inadequate basis upon which to base effective Design for Production.

Proceedings of the REAPS Technical Symposium. Paper No. 20: Application of the GIFTS-5 Minibased Graphics System for Ship Design and Analysis. The GIFTS finite element structural analysis system has been developed with the support of the Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Coast Guard, and members of the GIFTS Users Group (GUG). It is a graphics-oriented collection of programs, which operate on a standardized data base. The system is designed to fit in a relatively small core area, and is specifically suited to time sharing and mini-computer systems. It may be used as a stand-alone finite element package or as a pre- and postprocessor for other systems.