Maintain
While shipbuilding can take several years, a ship will remain in service for several decades. Understanding, storing, and accessing shipbuilding data throughout both acquisition and sustainment unlock new ways to maintain, manage, repair, and refit vessels.
Assess
Consistently monitoring and assessing the on-board reality, and managing that information in an accessible way, ensures that a clear view of the vessel exists.
That means:
Having access to up-to-date digital data from the ship.
Consistently capturing the status of the components on-board.
Being in a position to perform refit and repair efficiently when necessary.
With those elements in place, the need to perform unexpected repairs or refits can be mitigated, and when it is necessary, there will be fewer surprises uncovered throughout the process.
Digital Twin
Modern vessels are incredibly complex, and the amount of data generated from design through construction is massive. When that ship is handed over to the client, the digital information must remain associated with the ship. Effectively managing that data means fewer unexpected surprises and easier to perform maintenance, repair, and refit.
If the digital data isn't available, your teams need to have the ability to incrementally build the digital twin after the fact. Using technologies like laser scanning to capture the on the water state of the vessel and combining that with any CAD, PDF, or other data that is available, can give your organization a complete picture of the ship. Integrating that data together from every source helps capture the intent behind the digital information and keeps the digital thread intact. The result is a more significant ROI on vessels that have better-managed data.
Repair and Refit
When a digital twin is linked, updated, and available with a vessel in operation, a repair or refit can be made with minimal downtime. A shipyard can step in and have a complete picture of where to get started. Pushing and pulling changes to and from the digital twin makes changes easier and more accurate, thanks in part to better clash detection and visualization. When the change is complete, the digital twin is already updated while maintaining a history of what has been done.
However, even if a digital twin isn't available, using technologies like laser scanning and point clouds gives digital shipyards a leg up on any refit activity. If any information does exist, whether it is in the form of 2D PDFs or CAD data, it can be synchronized with the newly completed changes, maintaining the relationship downstream and making any future activity easier.
Operations
Modern vessels are full of onboard IoT sensors that consistently monitor the onboard reality and give your organization the ability to understand the vessel's status more accurately than ever before. When finding an action based on that information involves digging through multiple platforms and manually making connections between the data, it’s no surprise that many organizations fail to see the ROI they expected.
Managing that operational information, in a way that works specifically for the marine industry, allows for bottom-line benefits. The best ship owners/operators are accomplishing this by:
Consuming data from every source.
Understanding how every piece of information affects the vessel and organization.
Seamlessly integrating the data into the existing Information Platforms the organization uses.