“Are You Sure About That?”: Handling Uncertainty in an Early-Stage Ship Design Process

UCL teaches ship design at postgraduate and undergraduate level, using a combination of spreadsheets and commercial computer aided ship design tools. These tools produce single values for a given input and so uncertainty is only incorporated via margins. Experience has shown that students do not develop an effective understanding of engineering uncertainty using the current tools and approaches. This paper describes ongoing work to develop an “add on” to the existing UCL toolset to allow the representation of various ship parameters as uncertainty distributions. This is with the aim of better understanding of uncertainty in ship design, primarily for ship design education but with broader applications for concept design tasks.