Common generic block: Mass customization for shipbuilding

Abstract

Productive shipbuilders provide customized or made-to-order products to customers. To date, most of these ‘world class’ companies have succeeded by developing a series of repeatable type blocks which may be chosen and combined to form products that respond to customer needs. Type blocks have been developed as a result of long experience in customizing ships to specific needs while maintaining a repeatable build strategy. These are therefore empirically based. This paper reports on the early stages of work to develop a theory and methodology for developing type blocks for shipyards that do not currently have them in place and/or lack the historical base from which to extract common blocks. The concept of the common generic block (CGB) builds these using the principles of mass customization, a block complexity matrix, grouping using clustering techniques based on production attributes and applying a threshold value as a stopping criterion for the clustering.