SEANET

The Product Data Interchange for the Maritime Information Society
ESPRIT 4: 25606 (02/98 – 07/00 )

The SEANET project, partially funded by the European Commission ESPRIT programme, has created a virtual-enterprise-wide, Internet-based Product Data Management system that enables all maritime enterprises to take full advantage of STEP and XML standards for product and process data exchange. The system is independent of any one software vendor and uses thin client technology for product/process data access and consultation. A data exchange and workflow interconnection architecture has been created which is capable of supporting virtual enterprises and speeding information exchange between collaborative partners involved in all stages of the ship lifecycle. For example, between a shipyard and classification society, a shipyard to ship owner, model basin to shipyard, and so on.

Benefits:

A careful cost/benefit evaluation study has been carried out by the partners. The results of this study show that the implementation of the SEANET system will provide major improvements over current working practices.

• Our study shows that a delay of 6 months leads to a profit reduction of one third on average for the overall virtual enterprise. SEANET will reduce the time for completion by 40%, leading to an increase in profitability;
• Profitability is reduced by 2.2% for each 1% overrun on production costs, whilst, at present, 15% of all projects overrun their budget. SEANET will reduce the need for rework by 20%, thus reducing the number of projects overrunning production costs by 60%;
• The present impact of a 50% design cost overrun on total profitability is of 3.5%. Also, 40% of the time spent in design is taken with searching for information. By facilitating the access to information, SEANET will cut the design cycle time by 50%.

The technical objective of the project was the creation of an infrastructure (architecture) to support a distributed Product Data Management and exchange environment over the Internet for the shipping industry. This environment also supplies interconnected workflow tools and XML messaging. Previous work carried out by the ESPRIT project GLOBE provides the underlying common process definition environment for implementing the STEP-based data exchange workflows. The Internet forms the backbone of the network providing the basic communication structure over which XML messages are sent and web pages accessed.

The core of the implementation is the PETS™ Product Data Management System, which has been configured with the STEP Ship Product Model. The project then provides application views of the data via the STEP translators and interoperability views with other standards based on EXPRESS-X mapping technology. Workflow and security are also core technologies in this implementation.

Only over the last 2 - 3 years have STEP models of significant parts of the ship become available and mature enough for use in SEANET. Moreover, cumulative improvements in Internet, Web and distributed computing technologies multiply the possibilities for the remote creation and manipulation of distributed repositories of data. SEANET will fully benefit from the above newly matured techniques.

SEANET is an end user driven project. The impetus behind the development came from the final end-users of the system, which form a virtual maritime enterprise: shipbuilders (Odense Steel Shipyard), classification society (Lloyds Register) and the model basin (BMT). SEANET has created software tools for the maritime industry, and as such, the consortium includes the largest supplier of such tools (TRIBON). The SEANET aims are supported by a Product Data Management system (Quillion). A large part of the development has been concerned with tools operating on the Internet and the SEANET consortium includes a specialist of Internet and Web tools (TXT e-solutions). The consortium also includes an expert on STEP systems (EuroSTEP) who have developed data format conversion tools.