Abstract
Dear readers of International Shipbuilding Progress,
Summer is approaching in the Northern hemisphere, hopefully for real now. There are many activities going on in shipbuilding at the moment. International consortia are working on novel ship designs for the new global reality, zero-emission shipping has seen hard deadlines formulated and new facilities, such as the Seven Oceans Simulator centre (SOSc) at MARIN, have been opened to serve the international maritime community in preparing their operation and to investigate and optimise the human factor in these operations.
One will find that this new issue of ISP addresses these activities, which can be considered a measure of its relevance. The issue features a reflection on methods to assess shipbuilding costs, reports of a study about people interacting with the interface between staff and ship that we call bridge, and a hydrodynamic model of ship rudders that is used in different types of simulation software. The topics cover a broad range of the shipbuilding industry and we, the editorial board and I, hope that it will inspire.
Issue 71(1) contains the following articles.
The first article, titled Are current shipbuilding cost estimation methods ready for a sustainable future? A literature review of cost estimation methods and challenges by Alblas and Pruijn delivers precisely what is promised by means of the title. New ships have to be designed with energy conservation and environmental protection in mind and one may ask whether current shipbuilding cost estimation methods reflect these future requirements. The article discusses a range of cost estimation methods and offers a discussion of a potential way forward.
The next article is titled Assessment of navigators’ ergonomic awareness and working conditions on navigation bridges and written by Stopa. Information was collected from 200 professional seafarers about how they interact with the ship by means of a questionnaire that was developed specifically for this purpose. The information lead to the conclusion that there is room for improvement with regard to bridge design so that improved working conditions may lead to improved performance of maritime professionals on ships.
Tonelli and Vogels in MARIN rudder mathematical model report about their most recent developments together with an application. They carefully report the limitations of existing models in the literature and how their new model addresses them. The case study uses a well-known ship design from literature to demonstrate suitability of the mathematical model and how it corresponds to experiments.
We wish that you find this issue interesting and we wish you a good summer.
All the best,
Peter Wellens
Editor-in-chief