A decision making framework for cruise ship design

This thesis develops a new decision making framework for initial cruise ship design. Through review of effectiveness analysis and multi-criteria decision making, a uniform philosophy is created to articulate a framework that would enable a designer to more accurately assess what design alternatives are more important than others and how their changes affect the overall system being designed. Through a brief historical account, top-level Measures of Merit are developed and used with the framework and then applied to a requirements and effectiveness case study on initial concept development of a cruise ship. This is performed using Response Surface Methods to enable the user to visualize the design space as well as interact with it; the results and methods to visualize the design space are discussed. Finally, a Unified Tradeoff Environment is discussed, a framework that pools the aforementioned requirements and effectiveness analysis with design and technology forecasting to enable the user to make better informed requirements derivation and design selection.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Katsoufis, George P. (George Paraskevas)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Clifford A. Whitcomb.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35707

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35707