MARITECH’s Shipbuilding Information Infrastructure

The goal of the Shipbuilding Information Infrastructure is to improve the accessibility and value of enterprise information for US shipbuilders. This promises notable benefits because the shipbuilding industry has significant information requirements. A ship may comprise more than a million parts, each of which must be managed through the many design, manufacture, test and logistics processes. The ability to share information across processes and organizations not only streamlines existing processes but offers the opportunity to identify new, improved processes. In order to strengthen the industry as a whole, the shipbuilding information infrastructure has to satisfy the following technical requirements:An information technology gap separates the large, medium and small shipyards.The information technology staffs at most shipyards are experts in shipbuilding process requirements but not in system-level computer technologies.Shipyard information systems must be reliable and maintainable yet often need to be customized to suit an individual shipyard. This paper describes how the SHIIP and SPARS projects have used a deliberate combination of component-based software, Internet protocols and a portable computing platform to satisfy these technical requirements. It describes how the SHIIP project has demonstrated that the Shipbuilding Information Infrastructure can be used for information sharing within a shipyard and how the SPARS project has demonstrated that the same infrastructure can be used for information sharing among shipyards, their partners and suppliers.