Problem description
Since naval ships are designed to operate and survive in a hostile environment, one of their most important capabilities is their ability to withstand external threats. To that end, a vulnerability assessment is carried out during the design of the ship. During such an analysis, the availability of vital systems after different types of hits is assessed. This assessment preferably starts in the early stage design. However, assessing vulnerability is a non-trivial effort, because vulnerability highly depends on situation-dependent aspects, such as the operational scenario and the impact level. Furthermore, the available information in the early design stage is limited.
Research goal
Develop a vulnerability assessment methodology that is able to handle the situation-dependent nature of vulnerability with a limited level of detail.
Approach
Due to the increasing number of distributed machine systems on board naval ships, a network representation of the ship and its systems is used. This network includes information on both the layout of the ship (physical architecture) and the connections between systems (logical architecture). Subsequently, the availability of systems after multiple hits is determined with Markov theory, after which it can be determined which functions are still available. These mathematical results can then be used for developing a less vulnerable layout.
Expected contributions
Initial results show a high level of interdependency between systems, even if they are not related from a physical or logical point of view. This information helps designers to prioritise ship functions that should still be available during a damage scenario. After further development of the methodology, it is intended to be implemented in existing ship design procedures in order to approach naval ship design in an integrated fashion.
Project details
Type of research: PhD
Name of main researcher: Agnieta Habben Jansen
Project duration: 2016 – 2020 (expected)