Evaluation Criterion of Machinery Arrangement Design in a Ship Engine Room

Abstract

The aim of this study is to establish an objective evaluation function that can be used to compare alternative layouts by employing the quantification of particularities of arrangements in ship design. The arrangement of the machinery parts in a ship's engine room is decided at the design phase along with the location of various types of equipment that are located in a compartment. The design needs to maximize the function of every component, while taking into consideration the limited space of the ship. The addition and modification of requirements frequently occurs during the development process of a ship. Therefore, the ship designer suggests several alternative layouts, though only one layout is selected for the final design. This process depends on the experience, knowledge, and judgment of an expert designer, and it is consequently difficult to objectively evaluate the ship design. Therefore, according to quantification by using the fuzzy theory, we suggest a standard that can objectively evaluate alternative layouts to determine the most successful design. In order to provide a standard of evaluation, several evaluation functions are considered and established. By observing the results of the proposed method, the effectiveness of the proposed method is discussed. The results proved the convenience of the location of equipment in the space and the minimum size of the arrangement space in the engine room as well as the interrelationship between each type of equipment. Also, the proposed method showed the pipe producibility in ship building. As a result, the proposed method will contribute to reduce the production cost of ships.