Warship Concept Exploration and Definition at The Netherlands Defence Materiel Organisation

The Netherlands Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) is responsible for the procurement and sustainment of all weapon systems for all branches of the Netherlands Armed Forces.

Within the DMO, the Maritime Systems Division provides engineering support to both the Royal Netherlands Navy and the Defence Staff. The division is involved from day one of a warship procurement project. It counts support for policy formulation, budgeting, and the requirement formulation for new warships via concept exploration and concept definition studies, as well as costing, amongst its activities.

To conduct these studies, the Maritime Systems Division invested in a set of early stage ship design tools to efficiently conduct concept exploration and concept definition studies that benefit from the set-based design methodology. The toolset includes ship synthesis tools, performance prediction tools, costing models, operational models and data-visualisation.

The purpose of these tools twofold. First, to conduct an integral exploration of a wide range of alternative warship concepts to learn how requirements, ship design, effectiveness and cost interact, in order to identify desirable alternatives early on. Second, to define the most desirable alternatives in more detail to gain a better understanding of their performance, cost and risk.

Several applications were conducted recently in support of the planned renewal of the Royal Netherlands Navy fleet. They included studies into motherships for unmanned mine-countermeasures systems, antisubmarine-frigates, diesel-electric submarines and a combat support ship.

The paper outlines the process and tools used by the Maritime Systems Division of the DMO, discusses several of the recent applications and lists important insights gained from these them.