Designing for system value sustainment using interactive epoch-era analysis: A case study from commercial offshore ships

Abstract

This paper applies the Interactive Epoch-Era Analysis (IEEA) framework on a case study from commercial offshore ship design, incorporating techniques from visual analytics such as interactive visualizations to gain insight from large, high-dimensional data sets, resulting in improved strategies for value sustainment. New prototype visualizations are described that are motivated by a need to address design questions that are not well-suited for analysis with metrics, often applied in other EEA case studies, such as fuzzy Pareto number (FPN) or fuzzy normalized Pareto tract (fNPT) alone. For the offshore ship design case, this includes assessing the trade-off between designs optimized to target the primary mission versus being robust for uncertain subsequent missions. Further, considerations related to the implementation of interactive visualization applications, such as scalability and latency, are discussed emphasizing a need for continued research on methods for effectively handling large, high-dimensional data sets in design of complex systems under uncertainty.