HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering, the intermediate holding company for HD Hyundai's shipbuilding institutional sector, will build an integrated platform that connects ship design to production in a single data flow to accelerate the industry's digital transition.
HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering said on the 24th that it has selected Siemens Digital Industries Software (hereinafter Siemens), a global digital solutions corporations, as the preferred bidder to build a "ship design-to-production integrated platform."
Starting next year, HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering will begin detailed platform development with Siemens, apply it sequentially to domestic business sites such as HD Hyundai Heavy Industries and HD Hyundai Samho by 2028, and later expand it to overseas business sites.
Currently, various systems are used in ship design and production, including CAD for designing 3D models of ships, PLM for managing a ship's entire life cycle, and DM, which uses digital technology to plan and analyze manufacturing processes to optimize them and reflect the results in actual production.
The integrated platform merges systems that are currently operated separately into one so that design changes are immediately reflected on the production floor. It manages shipbuilding information as a single set of drawings that are linked in real time.
Previously, when designs changed, it was necessary to enter them separately into the production system, but once the integrated platform is built, design and production will be connected in real time as a single dataset, significantly reducing inefficiencies and errors caused by data breaks between processes. Not only block assembly and welding information but also piping and electrical data can be managed in an integrated way as a 3D model, which is expected to improve design accuracy, streamline production planning, and support the standardization of work processes.
In addition, HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering will work on building an industrial Metaverse based on a digital environment that precisely reproduces ships and shipyard sites in 3D. By applying Reinforcement Learning based on synthetic data in a virtual learning environment, the company plans to implement physical AI technology that can be used even in production environments with high variability.
The integrated platform is expected to play a key role in creating the digital manufacturing environment for FOS (Future of Shipyard), a next-generation shipyard that HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering has been pursuing since 2021 with the goal of completion in 2030.
HD Hyundai's shipbuilding institutional sector affiliates completed the first stage, "a visible shipyard," in Dec. 2023, and are accelerating efforts to implement the second stage, "a consolidation-prediction optimized shipyard," by 2026 and the third stage, "an intelligent autonomous operation shipyard," by 2030.
An HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering official said, "The integrated platform that consolidates design and production into one is a core foundation for realizing a next-generation smart shipyard," adding, "By establishing a digital manufacturing environment, we will fundamentally change the way work is done at shipyards and lead the paradigm shift in the shipbuilding industry."