This work describes an AI-based web application to predict passenger ship powering requirements. The data centric approach is developed based on the actual passenger ship design data as a design tool to assist naval architects to quickly estimate the ship brake power. It emphasised on the preliminary design stage to minimise design tasks and laborious calculations. Based on the study, it is observed that the model shows good agreement to the existing empirical method results with 10% mean absolute errors. Significantly, this presents the approach ability to facilitate faster and effective preliminary design, and scalability for large and complex systems.

Design complexity is generally experienced in the design development and production of large and complex systems. It is viewed as the key element that would determine the design development cycle and quality. In this context, a study was conducted to demonstrate the ROPAX ship design and development processes applying the QFD-AD method. It is proposed to synthesise and analyse the ship systems design and configurations at the early design phase. This study explored the method applicability to facilitate concurrent design and decision-making, alternative to the conventional ship design spiral model. Moreover, it presented the potential method to support holistic design approach in exploring ship design as large and complex systems.