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en-US en-US en-USJuly 2012 en-USwww.sname.org/sname/mt Powering Ship Design with LEAPS Integrating design and analysis tools into an automated high-end toolset (mt notes) Ships are large and complex products and have a long development cycle. Although it is widely rec -ognized that decisions made while the design is in its conceptual phase have the largest impacts on cost, performance, and schedule, due to their com -plexity, the majority of design time must be spent in the detailed design phase. To expedite the concep -tual design process, new designs are typically based on empirical explorations, which often results in products with high levels of risk and uncertainty or without suf -cient innovation. In many cases, the tools necessary to gain crucial design insight exist, but answers from the analysis come after their opportunity to inuence the design. is is a result of both the length of time it takes to complete the analysis, and the fact that the amount of design denition necessary to complete the analysis is not available when the analysis results are most needed. In addition, front-end tools for analyzing a ships requirements in the context of the overall fleet and the missions a vessel needs to perform are not inte -grated into the design process, eectively narrowing the scope of the design eort to a small section of the available trade space. ese challenges are the focus of how the United States Navy continues to develop its design and analysis tools: ey need to be integrated into an automated high-end toolset. A system such as this could be used to explore all aspects of many design congurations to ensure that we focus on the correct design before signing a contract to build a ship. On February 14, 2012, the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division released its latest version of the Leading Edge Architecture for Prototyping Systems (LEAPS) toolset, which includes the Advanced Ship and Submarine Evaluation Tool (ASSET). ese are LEAPS version 4.3 and ASSET version 6.3. LEAPS is the navy?s central product model database for early stage design. is database has been identied by senior navy leadership as the central repository for ship design data. It is built to contain all of the informa -tion required to describe a ship design, which includes ship geometry, characteristics, requirements, behav -iors, components, and systems. LEAPS is designed to be expandable, to include all information necessary to perform design or analysis activities, and to store the results of those activities for use by other tools or down -stream analysis. Reducing the risk of error LEAPS was developed as a solution to the data manage -ment issues associated with analyzing a ship design. e primary challenge is that each individual tool requires its own form of input le or native data format; therefore, up to 90% of the time required to perform an analysis is spent preparing/translating the input, which often BY ADRIAN MACKENNA AND SETH COOPER A th ree-dimensional inboard prole vi ew in ASSET of major compartments an d major machinery.