Systems engineering and digital twin: a vision for the future of cruise ships design, production and operations

Cruise ships are among the most complex and demanding products of the shipbuilding industry. The very special “payload” and exclusive operational profile, i.e. passengers looking for leisure and entertainment, imply outstanding performances in terms of safety standards and customer satisfaction. Attention to environment is relevant as well, since these ships are used to operate in spectacular marine ecosystems. The need of European shipyards to continuously progress to preserve the market leadership requires a virtuous evolution of the ship design process projected on a life cycle perspective. In this regard Systems Engineering appears to be a robust and reliable paradigm, able to provide the necessary comprehensive view of the cruise ship system as a whole together with a systematic methodological framework that, among the other advantages, enables the active and constructive participation of all the involved stakeholders in the decision-making process. In particular, Systems Engineering strongly relies on the so-called model-based engineering to share, integrate, combine and improve the level of details relevant to the system under development. In this paper the digital twin model will be discussed as a natural evolution of above-mentioned model-based engineering and its utilization in the shipbuilding field will be described as a very promising application especially in the field of cruise ships.