The National Shipbuilding Research Program PDF Download

In the mid 1960's the Computer Aided Ship Design and Construction project office, located in the Naval Ship Engineering Center, was chartered to apply computer aiding techniques to all phases of the naval shipbuilding process. After the aerospace industry's success in developing a productive wiring data system and an in-depth NAVSEC sponsored study at three designated naval shipyards of the cabling/wiring flow process during installation design, it was determined that a similar system should be developed for naval ship design and production. Because there are significant differences between wiring an aircraft and wiring a ship, a direct conversion from one application to the other was ruled out. In 1965 the Westinghouse Electric Corporation was selected to develop a system of computer programs for processing the flow of electrical and electronic cabling/wiring information used in ship construction. This system was to address the entire process of installation design of equipment on board any Navy ship. This included, such functions as cable routing, hanger selection, penetration design, planning and estimating supporting documents and the equivalent of all the necessary wiring plans. The C/W System is now being implemented at Norfolk and Long Beach and is scheduled for implementation in the other naval shipyards. This system is the first of what the author hopes will be a large number of computer aided ship design and construction programs to be developed and implemented by the Naval Sea Systems Command. It is expected that by applying these systems deliberately and diligently in an integrated shipyard modernization program, the total benefits of electronic data processing can be obtained, thus producing a better ship faster and at a lower cost.