AI in Ship Design, Construction and Operation

A PhD Position in Close Collaboration with the Maritime Industry

A ship is designed once, but it is lived with for decades. Moreover, a ship design company rarely works with just one ship. It works with an idea of a ship, designs that get evolved, customised, and built each time differently. At any moment, different instances of that idea exist side by side: some still on the drawing board, some under construction, others already operating and sending back streams of sensor data from daily operation. The knowledge that connects these instances, and that connects design, construction, and operation more broadly, rarely lives in one coherent place. It is scattered across documents, tools, and people, out of reach of the AI methods that could otherwise make efficient use of it.

This PhD position aims to investigate how such knowledge could be represented so it holds together across many instances and lifecycle phases of a ship, and becomes something AI methods, not...