Published: 1984
Total Pages: 120
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Shipbuilders throughout the world have difficulty in retaining people experienced enough to create complex machinery arrangements and simultaneously incorporate building strategies for integrated hull construction, outfitting and painting into designs. In the Third World, cheap-labor shipbuilding industries are becoming more effective in high volume standardized production. This forces shipyards in expensive-labor countries to address flexible manufacturing and construction systems. Such systems feature product oriented work breakdowns and statistical control of production. The resulting methods, developed to build ships, are also applied for effective construction of diverse products such as chemical and waste-treatment plants in any quantity, particularly one of a kind. Thus, any tools which facilitate integration of design and production-engineering for a wide variety of end products are of great interest. Computer-aided design (CAD) has developed remarkably in recent years. The most advanced employ hidden-line and shading techniques so that a computer-generated three dimensional picture is presented as if it were of a physical model. Where CAD capabilities exist they have to some extent replaced need for physical models. However, there are inherent limitations. Complex three-dimensional arrangements cannot be readily perceived on a two-dimensional surface of a cathode-ray tube. Also, screen sizes limit teams of designer-planners from viewing and discussing all aspects of a complex arrangement simultaneously. For complicated arrangements, the need for physical models persists. The need is amplified by the revolution in shipbuilding methods which began in the U.S. shipbuilding industry in 1979. Simply described, the revolution features a shift in logic, i.e., from system to zone orientation for most design and production-engineering efforts.