Systems Engineering and Zonal Ship Design

This paper relates the Defense Acquisition University defined systems engineering process to zonal ship design at the concept and feasibility design level. In particular, it describes an effective way of capturing a complete set of customer requirements based on the Universal Navy Task List (UNTL) and allocating these required functions to system packages comprised of hardware, software, and manpower elements. These system packages are allocated to ship zones such that loss of adjacent zones will result in the retention of sufficient system packages to meet survivability requirements. The allocated system packages also are used to establish zonal distribution system requirements to enable zonal distributed system design in a manner described in a previous paper presented at the ASNE Reconfiguration and Survivability Symposium in February 2005. System packages can also be used to develop skills based manpower requirements to determine required shipboard accommodations. The software element of the system packages can be used to estimate software development cost as well as Total Ship Computing Environment needs. The paper will also highlight ongoing efforts to incorporate this process into early stage ship design tools at NAVSEA.