The Development of a Decision Support System for Propeller Design

The development of any design support system (DSS) is complex. It depends on the task being supported and the organization that is going to use it including its present design practices. This paper describes the initial steps in developing a DSS for marine propeller design based on the process carried out at HSVA (Hamburg Ship Model Basin). We follow a structured approach for this development. We outline the approach in detail and describe the execution of its rst steps. We emphasize the need to carefully structure the design task into simpler subtasks and map them initially to computational tasks and only subsequently to implementated modules. The initial mapping has been missing from previous reports on DSSs for propeller design. We identify some of these computational tasks, present a high level view of the DSS' architecture, and discuss our approach to implement it.