US Navy uses Plexus for highly complex Ship Design Process Modeling
9th January 2012
Plexus Planning, supplier of world-leading planning software and services for large & complex projects, has announced that the US Navy is using Plexus as the key tool for its Ship Design Process Model for naval surface combatant ships – an extreme example of complexity management.
The US Navy Design Community has long sought for a model of the overall ship design process, but given the complexity of the process, and without a suitable methodology and tool, this has been impossible to achieve. Now, with Plexus, the US Navy has a unique ability for the collaborative construction of boxes-and-arrows diagrams that can then be viewed as Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) and subjected to a wide variety of analyses to produce Gantt Charts and other critical views.
Plexus is a versatile tool and powerful methodology with outstanding ability to elicit and represent complex networks of activities and dependencies with alternative or cyclic logic. Plexus supports activity grouping in multiple hierarchies and significantly facilitates sequencing, scheduling and other trade-off analysis for multiple objectives.
The end result is a model capable of tracing many activities and their associated products through several alternative paths of a ship design process. For each alternative path, the process can be ranked in terms of its cost, schedule, and risk. Clearly, this type of model can be used to improve the design process and planning for ship design projects: It can also be used to show technology investment tradeoffs, train systems engineers, and assess existing capabilities.