Autor: Christoph Schäfer

Technologies such as Digital Mock Up (DMU) or Virtual Reality (VR) help to expose and fix design errors at an early stage in the product development process. Nevertheless the discovery of these potential problems is still a common obstacle. The approach introduced within this paper improves the existing virtual product validation method by using the company’s existing knowledge of former projects. The DMU-Cockpit integrates the usually spread experience of known errors in one tool by modelling a relation between classified components and sources of error in a matrix. This allows the automatic selection of potential sources of error for a chosen part and derives the most valuable validation tasks of the knowledge base.

Competence in building more innovative ships will help the German Maritime Industry guaranteeing its existence under competitive conditions in respect to Asia. The realistic visualisation with Virtual Reality (VR) enables the demonstration of the shipyard’s design competence to the customer in an early stage as well as the discussion of design decisions and their implications between ship yard and supplier. Using the example of shipbuilding, the article shows which changes in the business processes of a company are essential for an efficient use of VR and which add-ons are necessary for a user-oriented ease of operation.