The design of distributed ship service systems, or distributed systems, integrates concepts of vessel layout, system functionality, and the distributed systems configuration. Understanding the design relationships between these concepts is a critical aspect of investigating and developing design requirements. Thus, in the design of complex naval vessels, the distributed systems configuration, called the physical solution, must be considered in early-stage design activities to ensure that emergent functional requirements are achievable and affordable. To address this, we propose a novel perspective for modeling and investigating physical solutions in the architectural design of distributed ship service systems. Our approach uses scalable network representations of vessel layout and functional relationships within systems to stochastically generate ensembles of distributed system solutions. Ensembles are then evaluated to determine system characteristics, bringing physical solution information into early-stage requirement elucidation. We demonstrate our approach using concept-level vessel knowledge to identify distributed system characteristics, and show the method's usefulness in understanding complex distributed systems design relationships.

This paper introduces a framework for analyzing distributed ship systems. The increase in interconnected and interdependent systems aboard modern naval vessels has significantly increased their complexity, making them more vulnerable to cascading failures and emergent behavior that arise only once the system is complete and in operation. There is a need for a systematic approach to describe and analyze distributed systems at the conceptual stage for naval vessels. Understanding the relationships between various aspects of these distributed systems is crucial for uninterrupted naval operations and vessel survivability. The framework introduced in this paper decomposes information about an individual system into three views: the physical, logical, and operational architectural representations. These representations describe the spatial and functional relationships of the system, together with their temporal behavior characteristics. This paper defines how these primary architectural representations are used to describe a system, the interrelations between the architectural blocks, and how those blocks fit together. A list of defined terms is presented and a preliminary set of requirements for specific design tools to model these architectures is discussed. A practical application is introduced to illustrate how the framework can be used to describe the delivery of power to a high energy weapon.

A key challenge in complex design problems that permeate science and engineering is the need to balance design objectives for specific design elements or subsystems with global system objectives. Global objectives give rise to competing design pressures, whose effects can be difficult to trace in subsystem design. Here, using examples from arrangement problems, we show that the systems-level application of statistical physics principles, which we term 'systems physics', provides a detailed characterization of subsystem design in terms of the concepts of stress and strain from materials physics. We analyze instances of routing problems in naval architectures, and show that systems physics provides a direct means of classifying architecture types, and quantifying trade-offs between subsystem-and overall performance. Our approach generalizes straightforwardly to design problems in a wide range of other disciplines that require concrete understanding of how the pressure to meet overall design objectives drives the outcomes for component subsystems.

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