Ship Complexity Assessment at Concept Design Stage

A innovative complexity metric has been introduced in this paper and provides a solution to compare similar or different ship types and size together at the contract design stage. The goal is to provide the designer with such information throughout the design process so that an efficient design is obtained at the first design run. Application and validation on a real passenger ships have shown that a significant correlation between the error of an engineer’s judgement of omplexity and the cost assessment error can be obtained. It follows that this tool could be used to improve the knowledge of ship’s complexity at the contract design stage or even to try to optimise their design if the complexity criteria are not fixed by the shipowners.