Visualization of the conceptual design process of ships by a graphical user interface

Abstract

To improve ship designers productivity in the conceptual design process, the concept of visualization has been applied. It transforms a conventional text-based software for the conceptual design of ships into a system with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) user interface. Most of the decisions which a designer should make in a design process can be made with the help of mouse buttons and graphical objects displayed on a computer screen. In implementing such a graphical user interface (GUI), the concept of graphics standards has also been introduced to increase portability of the developed system. The Motif widget set has been selected as the baseline system software. With the developed functions, both the ship and the design process can be better visualized.