Concept Design of a Hybrid Offshore Patrol Vessel

This paper presents the proposal for the concept design of hybrid Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPV) that are suitable for countries with budget constraints. Many countries cannot afford two different classes of ships to answer the current civil and military challenges. Therefore, the proposed approach might be the most acceptable solution for these countries. The concept design covers hybrid OPVs that could include traditional navy capabilities such as anti-ship and anti-air warfare in addition to offshore patrol tasks. This enables a hybrid concept design model that incorporates major tasks of both patrol and corvette classes of ships. The solutions are achieved by applying a multi-attribute concept design procedure that was developed earlier for a generic naval vessel design. The procedure is customized to suit this purpose by applying appropriate design variables, parameter space constraints, updated ship propulsion systems, weapons, other equipment, and design requirements i.e., required areas, volumes, and electricity. The results are the Pareto optimal set of solutions that are used as initial designs in the subsequent phases of the design of the hybrid OPV. The earlier developed software named “MonakoPRB” is updated to suit the above-mentioned changes in the design procedure to generate hybrid OPV concept design solutions.