Ship inspection support system using a product model

Recently, the significance of ship inspections has been increasingly recognized because sea pollution and safety problems are occurring more and more frequently. However, current ship inspections rely on the experience of the workers. Therefore, it is difficult to understand, and hence to improve, the state of ship inspections. In this paper, ship inspection is directed into three stages (plan, do, and check), and the configurations of a total system to support ship inspections are discussed. A prototype system for the "plan" and "do" stages is developed. This is realized by organizing the information that relates to inspection, and defining data models for damage and inspection states. Then the proposed system is integrated with a shipbuilding computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) system so that the ship's structural information can be used effectively. In addition, functions to calculate the damage-finding probability, and functions to generate information about damage and the inspection state are introduced. Therefore, in the planning stage, as inspector can execute a virtual ship inspection, and then the damage-finding probability of each hull part and oversight areas are calculated automatically. Further, by carrying this system into an inspection, an inspector can generate damage information and inspection information simply and easily. Some examples of the proposed system are shown at the end of the paper.