Integrated Decission support approach for ship, fleet, and maritime supply chain design

The maritime industry constantly faces a number of commercial and technological challenges. Many current challenges are closely linked to the globalization of world trade which has led to greater value chain complexity. New and demanding maritime operati ons in harsh environments like in the Arctic and the development of extensive new oil and gas reservoirs like on the Brazilian continental shelf also introduce numerous new commercial and technological challenges. Combined with a sharper focus on develop ing more efficient and robust value chains, this increased complexity is leading to ever stricter requirements being made of the maritime logistics solutions that are incorporated in these value chains. In order to develop new vessel concepts and maritim e logistics solutions capable of dealing with greater complexity and performance requirements, a precondition will be that developing vessel concepts, optimizing fleet size and mix, and chain design all take place as parts of an integrated process. Tradit ionally, these design decisions have been made in a stepwise process with limited correlation. Decisions made on the chain design level could therefore set boundaries that disallow optimal ship design and vice versa. Even though there exists tools and met hodologies that cover single elements of the integrated process, e.g. TurboRouter (MARINTEK) as a decision support tool for maritime fleet management and PreContractTool (DNV) for conceptual vessel design, based on our knowledge there exist no tools and methodologies that in an efficient way secure such an integrated design process. The partners in this pilot project firmly believe that development of such a decision support system / methodology will be of great value for primary parties in the maritime industry like shipowners, shipbuilding industry, cargo owners, and shippers.