Abstract
The early-phase naval ship design demands requirements synthesis rather than design synthesis, which conducts engineering design for several domains on a detailed level. Requirements synthesis focuses on creating a balanced set of required operational capabilities satisfying user's needs and concept of operations. Requirements are evolved from capability based languages to function based language by statistical exploration and engineering design which are derived in the following order: concept alternative, concept baseline, initial baseline and functional baseline. The early-phase naval ship design process can be divided into three passes: concept definition, concept exploration and concept development. Main activities and outcomes in each pass are shortly presented. Concept definition is the first important step that produces a concept baseline through extensive design space exploration promptly. Design space exploration applies a statistical approach to explore design trends of existing ships and produce feasible design range corresponding to concept alternative. It further helps naval systems engineers and operational researchers by inducing useful responses to user and stakeholders' questions at a sufficient degree of confidence and success in the very early ship design. The focus of this paper is on the flow of design space exploration, and its application to a high-speed patrol craft. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors, and do not reflect the official policy or rule of the Navy.