About this Issue….

Welcome to AECWeekly! Happy New Year!

AECCafe has started something new, something just for users: users are now invited to submit a User ViewPoint Article to AECCafe.com at any time. Submit a ViewPoint essay and express your concerns, your advice, your aspirations, or just about anything you want to more than 60,000 monthly AECCafe.com unique visitors. The primary focus should be on the AEC industry, but you can also use this opportunity to address issues that affect us all, or any topic that you feel will be of interest to the engineering community.

We welcome essays about your experiences in academia, in industry, and with vendors and their tools, both positive and negative, but please do not use this medium to 'bad mouth' a former employer or to make unsubstantiated attacks on anyone or any company.

Each essay's title is presented on the AECCafe.com home page and links back to the essay itself.

If you'd like to learn more about this program, or if you'd like to submit a viewpoint essay to express your concerns, your advice, your aspirations, frustrations, or just about anything you want, to our monthly AECCafe.com visitors, please visit www.AECCafe.com and get started.

This week's Industry News section highlights the recent release of AVEVA's VANTAGE Marine Version 11.6, the first result of the acquisition of Tribon Solutions, the world leader in ship hull design and production.

In the coming weeks we look forward to bringing you a look at what vendors and industry experts consider “emerging technologies” for the year 2006.

AECWeekly is a news magazine featuring important industry news profiles, a summary of recently published AEC product and company news, customer wins, and coming events. Brought to you by AECCafe.

AECWeekly examines select top news each week, picks out worthwhile reading from around the web, and special interest items you might not find elsewhere. This issue will feature Industry News, Acquisitions/Agreements/Alliances, Announcements, Wins, Appointments, New Products, Around the Web and Upcoming Events.

AECWeekly welcomes letters and feedback from readers, so let us know what you think. Please send me your comments

Best wishes,
Susan Smith, Managing Editor

Industry News

On the High Seas with AVEVA Ship Design and Production Software
By Susan Smith

AVEVA Americas' Marine industry manager, Rob Glasier, is clearly wild about ships and shipbuilding. “They're fascinating because they are about the biggest thing mankind has ever made and they are very complex.”

Rob Glasier

Glasier spoke with me recently to discuss the release of AVEVA's VANTAGE Marine version 11.6, the first result of the acquisition of Tribon Solutions, the world leader in ship hull design and production.

At the recent American Shipbuilding Annual Meeting and Congressional Caucus, of which AVEVA is an industry partner, it was stated that while there are problems in shipbuilding in the U.S. competitively around the world, it is still a huge market with a tremendous amount of employment. The challenge is that the U.S. needs to build more ships, particularly naval vessels, as the competition abroad, especially in China, threatens to outdo the U.S. “By 2013 or earlier, China expects to have the world's largest navy by far, probably 2 to 3 times as many ships as we have,” stated Glasier. China does not have the restrictions of government in matters of building that the U.S. has; they simply build 500 ships if they want them. In contrast, the cost of building ships in the U.S. has become so expensive that there is a fear that we won't be able to compete on the high seas in the future.

As Congress is focused on the cost of building naval vessels, another large problem looming on the horizon is that the U.S. doesn't have the efficiencies in the shipyards like the Europeans, Koreans, Japanese and Chinese have.

Basically, AVEVA is ready to address a lot of these global challenges with the marriage of AVEVA and Tribon Solutions. So what do each of these companies bring to the table?

According to Glasier, AVEVA “invented” computer aided process plant design where it was originated in Cambridge in 1967 as the company CADcentre, “in fact they are still associated with Cambridge University,” he noted.

What spawned AVEVA was the idea that any kind of a problem was a database problem, that if it has graphics as part of the solution, whether it is a model created or a drawing created, those are really outputs to help manage the information that's being created. Right from the beginning, AVEVA has had a datacentric approach, centered around the whole idea that you created a database, and output drawings or models out of that database: the genesis of their plant design product PDMS.

Around the same time (about thirty years ago), Kockums Shipyard in Sweden was trying to automate. Their computer systems group developed tools to use for the shipyard. Kockums eventually spun this group off as Kockums Computer Systems which remained separate but co-owned by the shipyard and they sold their solution. Kockums Computer Systems, or KCS, was renamed Tribon Solutions in 2000 when The Sixth Pension Fund bought KCS from Celsius, owner of Kockums Shipyard and other military companies. KCS' approach was a datacentric approach to ship design where a ship model database is created with intelligence added. As you add intelligence to that database, it gets more information and is able to do preliminary design, detail design and structural design, but with a datacentric approach.

[ Click to enlarge ]

Two years ago AVEVA approached Tribon Solutions. The product approaches are very similar as far as technology. The products are different as far as how they were implemented but they both have a data centric approach to their problems. In most of today's ships, especially ocean liners and cruise ships, everything above the main deck looks like a floating hotel. If you look at all commercial vessels these days, the upper superstructures are actually made just like a building or a hotel and then a crane lifts it up and sets it on top of the hull and then they weld it on.

These “topsides” are the same in offshore: the topsides or superstructures of most all vessels and platforms have been plant design challenges executed by AEC/plant design systems.

“But the hull is a very unique problem,” Glasier charged. “because you have three big issues with the hull, which take it out of the realm of a mechanical design system or plant design system. 1) a lot of contours with ships, as well as with offshore platforms, especially when you get into deepwater stuff, such as Spar platforms, Tension Leg Platforms (TLPs), semi-submersibles, etc. and the crossover which is the Floating Production and Offloading System (FPSO), which is basically like a ship designed just to be a drilling production platform. They all have hull design problems which have a lot of unique geometries. Mechanical systems can kind of handle the geometry, plant design systems can't. 2) But ships and platforms have a lot of structural and piping components like in AEC/plant products which have to fit inside the ship 'shipshape shape.' Mechanical systems don't have the structural engineering, the structural design, and piping design capabilities to handle putting all the stuff inside, and plant design systems can't handle the complex geometries. Ships are really unique because they're so complex; they have hundreds of thousands of components.”

3) Ship hulls, whether they're for a platform or a hull, are so huge, and just like a building, whether it's a building or a plant, they have to be broken up into compartments and spaces both from a design and manufacturing and production standpoint. The design must be handled modularly, then put back together at the job site. Again, plant design systems can handle that part of it but mechanical systems can't.”