How to draw a boat.

Changes in CAD products over the last three years have been tremendous, primarily in the areas of collaborative design and object-based rendering. Concurrently, work in the shipyards has been shifting from being directly competitive with one another to "coopitition" -- that is, competing over Navy projects while cooperating on others. This parallels the aerospace industry, where designers at companies like Lockheed and Boeing are friends on some projects and enemies on others. This, in turn, has drawn attention to the IT departments in these operations, and the need for more universal software.

Shipyards often use more than one CAD system, frequently because of all the different shipyard departments, divisions and groups required to design a product so huge, to say nothing of the array of sub-contractors. One CAD system may be dedicated to detailed steelwork design, another to designing systems and equipment for outfitting, and still another for stress analysis. Specialized systems such as these weren't intended, originally, to support a fully collaborative operation. Newer parametric and object-based softwares, such as CATIA and others, help this process immensely, as each design component is imbued not only with built-in classification and attribute data (its identity), but grouping and connectivity information that, should an adjoining system be affected, will inform the designers that is being affected as well. For example, if a bulkhead in a stateroom design is being moved, the staff handling the HVAC system might receive an alert that ducting running through that bulkhead is being affect ed. These type of models also simplify the generation of specific application views, such as general aarrangement drawings and bills-of-material, because all applications share and are based on identical information. With object design technology, functional designs can be defined in the absence of part designs, an advantage, when projects move to a fast track status.

Much of the preceding information was contributed by Edward S. Popko, IBM Market Manager for Aerospace, Defense and Shipbuilding.