船舶专业船舶设计优化.doc

Ship Design Optimization This contribution is devoted to exploiting the analogy between a modern manufacturing plant and a heterogeneous parallel computer to construct a HPCN decision support tool for ship designers. The application is a HPCN one because of the scale of shipbuilding - a large container vessel is constructed by assembling about 1.5 million atomic components in a production hierarchy. The role of the decision support tool is to rapidly evaluate the manufacturing consequences of design changes. The implementation as a distributed multi-agent application running on top of PVM is described 1 Analogies between Manufacturing and HPCN There are a number of analogies between the manufacture of complex products such as ships, aircraft and cars and the execution of a parallel program. The manufacture of a ship is carried out according to a production plan which ensures that all the components come together at the right time at the right place. A parallel computer application should ensure that the appropriate data is available on the appropriate processor in a timely fashion. It is not surprising, therefore, that manufacturing is plagued by indeterminacy exactly as are parallel programs executing on multi-processor hardware. This has caused a number of researchers in production engineering to seek inspiration in other areas where managing complexity and unpredictability is important. A number of new paradigms, such as Holonic Manufacturing and Fractal Factories have emerged [1,2] which contain ideas rather reminiscent of those to be found in the field of Multi- Agent Systems [3, 4]. Manufacturing tasks are analogous to operations carried out on data, within the context of planning, scheduling and control. Also, complex products are assembled at physically distributed workshops or production facilities, so the components must be transported between them. This is analogous to communication of data between processors in a parallel computer, which thus als