Recent advances in the sensor and weapons systems being installed on US Navy ships and the electrification required to power them are now forcing the engineering community to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the tools and processes now in use. At the same time, over the last decade there have been significant changes in the way that software is architected and developed. User expectations for software tools have also radically changed. Newly minted engineers have grown to expect that any needed information can be easily found and that interactions with peers can happen seamlessly, allowing for ideas to freely flow. Now, more than at any other time, the complexity of the design of modern ships calls for new design tools and methods that permit, early in the design process, interactions and the exchange of information and ideas between all major disciplines including electrical, mechanical, thermal, control engineers, and the traditional naval architecture and marine engineering teams. The Electric Ship Research and Development Consortium (ESRDC) has developed a collaborative design environment called S3D (Smart Ship SystemDesign) with the goal of reforming the way in which engineers collaborate, model, design, and simulate complex systems, bringing together, as never before, the various disciplines involved in the ship design process. This paper will focus on the modeling and data exchange concerns that have typically represented major obstacles in the implementation of a collaborative design environment and the approaches taken by ESRDC and others to resolve these problems.

The Electric Ship Research and Development Consortium (ESRDC) conducted an extensive design exercise using the Smart Ship Systems Design (S3D) tool with the goal of exercising and improving the functionality of the S3D design environment currently under development by the ESRDC. To this end, a baseline ship and several variants were designed with a 10,000 ton displacement and a 100 MW integrated power system to explore the effects of new technologies and to determine the capability of S3D in elucidating differences between design variants. Key features and performance effects of each design and an analysis of S3D capabilities are presented.

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