toddis

The demands of the 21st century and the ever-present drive for higher efficiency is pushing the maritime industry towards more and more radical ship designs. Ships of the future need to pollute less, carry more, and be cheaper to build, operate, and manage at the same time. This places very high requirements on the technical design process of these ships.

At the same time, many of the empirical tools that naval architects use are becoming increasingly dated. The datasets behind these empirical tools are ageing rapidly, and are often based on experiments with a limited sample size. In the digital age, however, a wealth of big data can easily be collected from ships in service, potentially allowing such tools to be refined. And, although more accurate alternatives, such as CFD, are available for these, the empirical tools have one major advantage: speed. Such tools therefore still hold a very important place in the naval architect’s toolkit, especially when it comes to automated optimization approaches.

The TODDIS (Transferring Operational Data into Design Information for Ships) project was therefore initiated to do exactly as the name suggests: use this new untapped resource of operational big data to improve ship design tools. DEKC Maritime is a part of the TODDIS consortium as an executive partner, and will assist in processing the collected operational data to allow more insight into topics such as ship resistance, seakeeping, and open-top ship design.