A Capability Based Approach for Warship Design

Traditional Naval Warship design is based on a rather sharp separation between two domains: the Platform and the Combat System. Naval engineers are primarily concerned with the Platform, with tight interaction with other disciplines such as mechanical and electrical engineers. On the other hand, Combat Systems engineers are more concerned with the technological component of the Warship, working in tight coordination with electronic, software or telecommunications engineers. The resulting system (the Warship) is often closer to a Federation of Systems, with more or less controlled interactions among each other, rather than to a truly integrated system. The focus of this paper is to present a novel approach to the design of a Warship that avoids the a-priori distinction between Platform and Combat System, but considers the Warship as a single, coherent whole. Thus, the approach shifts the focus on the level of the whole warship’s capabilities, and its related measures of effectiveness and performance, rather than on its components and subsystems. The aim of such effort is to increase the mutual awareness of the problems specific of each of its components among the entire range of teams called to design, develop, produce, integrate, test and maintain a system as complex as a modern Warship