On-The-Fly Design Rationale to Support Real-Time Collaborative Naval Ship Layout Design

This paper presents a new design rationale methodology to support collaborative design decision-making during early stage complex ship design. The nature of collaborative design is described and the need and key challenges of design rationale capturing and reuse are identified.
Subsequently, the methodology is developed to overcome these key challenges. A primary characteristic of the methodology is it’s integration with design tools to reduce intrusiveness and enhance usefulness during collaborative design sessions. Finally, a case study was used to demonstrate the usefulness of the developed design rationale ontology, a critical step in providing designers an improved capability to capture and reuse design rationale during collaborative design decisionmaking.