Completion of the EU Research Project SHIPLYS

SHIPLYS (Ship life cycle software solutions) is a three-year project that started in September 2016. The project is in response to needs of SME naval architects, shipbuilders and ship-owners, who, in order to survive in the world market, need to improve their capability to reduce the time and costs of design and production. 

SHIPLYS provides these improvements by developing functionality that includes rapid virtual prototyping and the ability to factor in LCCA (Life Cycle Cost Analysis), environmental assessments, risk assessments and end-of-life considerations at the very early design stages when only limited data is available.

The SHIPLYS consortium, led by TWI Ltd, is formed by 12 partners from 7 EU countries: TWI Ltd (UK); Fundacion Centro Technologies SOERMAR (Spain); Atlantec Enterprise Solutions GmbH (Germany); University of Strathclyde (UK); Astilleros de Sandander SA (Spain); National Technical University of Athens (Greece); Instituto Superior Tecnico (Portugal); Varna Maritime Limited (Bulgaria); Ferguson Marine Engineering Ltd (UK); Alveus L.L.C (Croatia); BMT Group Ltd (UK); Lloyd’s Register EMEA IPS (UK).

Key tasks in the project included the development of:

• A SHIPLYS platform enabling the integration of a variety of Applications used in early ship design
• Rapid early design and production simulation tools (Applications)
• LCCA, environmental and risk assessment software Applications for fast and cost-effective evaluation of alternatives
• The development of multi-criterion decision analysis techniques to support decision making across the short/ long term, based on explicit user defined decision criteria

Work within SHIPLYS project started with analyzing end users’ needs using the Quality Function Deployment method and selecting end-user cases, called design case “Scenarios” that indicate the types of problems for which the project aspired to develop solutions. Then, the project continued with collecting relevant data and parameters for early ship design, LCCA, risk and environmental aspects, thus incorporating and building on the existing ISO 10303 Application Activity Model.

In the run-up to project completion, SHIPLYS consortium organised two training workshops to present the SHIPLYS platform and the developed solutions (software applications) in order to gain feedback from interested stakeholders. The first workshop was held in June 2019 in Varna that was attended by representatives from Bulgarian shipyards, design technical offices and universities. The second workshop was held in July in Vigo with stakeholders from Spain and nearby locations attending.

The Consortium is grateful to all those who directly or indirectly supported the project; particularly, we acknowledge with thanks the funding received from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 690770.

The project results have been reported in several public deliverables and in numerous scientific papers published in established maritime conferences or journals.