A Hybrid Agent Approach for Set-based Conceptual Ship Design

Advanced marine design, particularly in the United States, advocates the use of cross-functional design teams, or Integrated Product Teams (IPT’s), who will undertake a concurrent engineering approach to all phases of ship design. Further, the study of the world-class Toyota automotive design process has highlighted the potential of a set-based design approach in concurrent engineering to provide a greater probability of achieving a global optimum for the overall design. A hybrid humancomputer agent approach is introduced to facilitate set-based conceptual ship design by a crossfunctional team of naval architects and marine engineers. The disciplinary/technical specialists are organized and tasked as agents within a design network that can be either be co-located or interconnected across the web. Computer agents are introduced between each pair of human design agents to facilitate their communication and negotiation. A systematic market approach, developed in the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored Responsible Agents for ProductProcess Integrated Design (RAPPID) project, was utilized as an initial approach to facilitate this team, set-based design. The conceptual design of a hatch-covered, cellular, feeder container ship was undertaken by a team of student design agents to assess the effectiveness of this design approach. The design process converged within one six-hour design session indicating the promise of a hybrid agent approach in future marine conceptual design efforts.