Category Archives: Shipbuilding

Visualizing your Shipyard with Shipyard AI

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Shipyard AI, ProModel’s dedicated shipbuilding application, continues to evolve and develop new capabilities – With five software releases in 2019, desired improvements in shipyard capacity management, optimization, scheduling and process engineering have been realized.   In addition, there has been a heavy emphasis on improving management’s ability to visualize shipyard production at both the strategic and tactical levels, at a single glance.

Building on a Strong Foundation

Historically, Shipyard AI has provided solid data and process information in highly detailed representations.  The application has included the following key visualizations, which we’ve continued to refine and improve over the years.

The Laydown map provides a top-down view of the entire shipyard with animation showing the progress of ship construction over time.

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Capacity Utilization Package (CUP) reports visualize resource utilization over time.

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The Schedule screen features a Gantt chart representation of hull construction.

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The Unit Template Tree report shows a hierarchical breakdown of a hull into its component grand blocks, blocks, panels, etc.

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New Ways of Seeing the Shipyard

A recent emphasis on developing new types of visualizations is bearing fruit. This article introduces new ways of seeing the shipyard: the strategic Milestone Chart, the more tactical Location Resource View, and an updated Map Shapes editor.

Milestone Chart

A new Milestone Chart on the Hulls screen provides a strategic management view — visualizing the production of many hulls across long periods of time in a single view.

Image_SYAI Hulls Screen With Milestone Chart Nov 2019

Location Resource View

The Location Resource View report shows unit placements over time grouped by location.

This view allows you to interface with a unit and its dependencies in a single action, reducing the time needed and the possible introduction of errors. It provides a visualization of space in the shipyard over time to help you quickly make re-planning decisions.

Image_SYAI Location Resource View Report Nov 2019

Map Shape Editor

In an upcoming release, we’ll provide a map shapes editor to allow you to quickly add and edit unit shapes.

You can assign map shapes at the unit template level to have units appear on the Laydown Map with the correct shape.

Image_SYAI Map Shape Editor

See the What’s New Shipyard AI Webpage for more details on this year’s releases.

Ingalls Develops Automated Unit Lay-Down ‘Advisor’ with Capacity Planning Tool

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Image_Ingalls from theSigal MagazineHuntington Ingalls Industries – Ingalls Shipbuilding (Ingalls) identified substantial savings potential in the lay-down placement and assignment process that had been previously utilized for managing asset location throughout the construction process.

Building four different hull forms in the tight shipyard footprint is a challenge. Ingalls Shipbuilding work instructions define the processes and responsibilities for the proper allocation and optimization of real estate (lay-down spaces) for structural units and assemblies under construction, while providing forward visibility for scheduled or potential overloads to capacity.

However, the old capacity planning processes were tedious and overly time-consuming. Resulting real estate allocations were seldom optimal and often required substantial rework to resolve space allocation conflicts, as the construction schedules for each hull form jockey for the same production resources.

The Ingalls team developed an automated process that optimizes unit layout and scheduling, and increases the construction of many units under a covered structure, significantly improving production rates—a plus in the hot southern climate.

“The new tool has taken a process that historically took 10 weeks to complete and can now finish the scheduling activity in less than an hour. Following project completion and full system implementation, we expect to reduce ‘real estate’ allocation processing time by 30% and place 20 more units ‘under cover’ annually, with an estimated cost savings of over $990K per year.”

 (Article Courtesy of “theSignal” and DefenseNews.com)

Click here to read the rest of the Ingalls story