Navy Secretary John Phelan warns the U.S. must treat shipbuilding with wartime urgency, launching a new office to address submarine delays and outdated acquisition processes.

A team of Chinese researchers funded by China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) recently claimed to have used artificial intelligence (AI) to design an electrical layout of a warship with 100 percent accuracy and at an unprecedented speed. A team of researchers from the China Ship Design and Research Center, headed by Luo Wei, a senior engineer with the ship design center, published a paper in the Chinese-language journal Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems on February 27. The researchers claimed in the paper that their AI designer took only a day to complete work that humans would need nearly a year to achieve with the most advanced computer tools. Considering the scale and complexity of modern warships, mistakes are sure to happen during the design process, and it can take several hours to discover and rectify them. However, when the researchers put the AI designer to the test, with more than 400 challenging tasks, they found that the AI could accomplish 100 percent accuracy.

My childhood friend Marco was born and raised like me, in the Italian maritime city of Monfalcone. Fifty miles away from Venice, at the very North tip of the Mediterranean, he works in the city shipyard. Marco is a descendant of a long history of artisans whose lineage can be traced back to Venetian shipbuilders in the Middle Ages. Unlike his ancestors, much of Marco's work relies on his manual skills, augmented by today's digital aids. Paraphrasing an old Industry 4.0 joke, I once told Marco how the super-automated shipyard of the future "…will only need two employees: a guard dog, and you, hired to feed the dog."

Daewoo Shipbuilding Company, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, has experienced great deal of trouble with the planning and scheduling of its production process. To solve the problems, from 1991 to 1993, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Daewoo jointly conducted the Daewoo Shipbuilding Scheduling (das) Project. To integrate the scheduling expert systems for shipbuilding, we used a hierarchical scheduling architecture. To automate the dynamic spatial layout of objects in various areas of the shipyard, we developed spatial scheduling expert systems. For reliable estimation of person-hour requirements, we implemented the neural network-based person-hour estimator.

A cutting-edge, £1 million robot ship will cross the Atlantic Ocean unmanned next year to commemorate 400 years since the maiden voyage of the Mayflower to the USA. The Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) will set off on its pioneering, 2,750-mile trip in September 2020, following in the trail of its namesake 400 years earlier. The 15-metre long, catamaran-style ship will be powered by state-of-the-art renewable energy. It will be unmanned but will have marine AI on board, and will be steered from a control room in Plymouth, Devon - where the original Mayflower set off from. It will carry three research pods, containing sensors and other equipment, which scientists hope will pave the way for ground-breaking research into ocean conditions for autonmous navigation.

A hundred and thirty three years--that's how long Virginia-based Newport News Shipbuilding has been in the business of manufacturing ships. As the sole developer of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers, the company has constructed more than 30 warships, including the world's first and largest nuclear-powered carrier, which weighs 100,000 tons and comprises 300 million parts. Traditionally, building a ship like this might require 30 million to 40 million man-hours. Digital transformation has upended the ship building business, said Bharat Amin, VP and chief information officer at Newport News Shipbuilding, on stage at Siemens' Spotlight on Innovation, an annual technology conference held recently in Orlando. "You hear about smart cities, we want to be a smart shipyard," Amin told the audience.

ULSAN, SOUTH KOREA – When Lee Dong-hee came to Ulsan to work for Hyundai Heavy Industries five years ago, shipyards in the city known as Hyundai Town operated day and night and workers could make triple South Korea's annual average salary. But the 52-year-old was laid off in January, joining some 27,000 workers and subcontractors who lost their jobs at Hyundai Heavy between 2015 and 2017 as ship orders plunged. To support their family, Lee's wife took a minimum wage job at a Hyundai Motor supplier. His 20-year-old daughter, who entered a Hyundai Heavy-affiliated university hoping to land a job in Ulsan, is now looking for work elsewhere. The Lee family's fortunes mirror the decline of Ulsan, which is now reeling from Chinese competition, rising labor costs and its overreliance on Hyundai -- one of the giant, family-run conglomerates, known as chaebol, that dominate South Korea.

If two junior Navy officers have their way, the warships of the future will be floating factories that create everything from food to robots and spare parts -- all thanks to 3-D printers. Shipyards will use them on a vast scale. And when the ships need more raw materials, they'll link up with "biomining" ships that harvest raw materials from the sea. Writing in Proceedings, the influential journal of the U.S. Naval Institute, the pair write that the growth of 3-D printing machines could change almost everything about how the Navy builds stuff "through the design and construction of ships, submarines, aircraft, and everything carried on board." On a smaller scale, they write that 3-D printers could change the way the Navy handles logistics and the way it produces tools, components and supplies for its ships.

Daewoo Shipbuilding Company, one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, has experienced great deal of trouble with the planning and scheduling of its production process. To solve the problems, from 1991 to 1993, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and Daewoo jointly conducted the Daewoo Shipbuilding Scheduling (das) Project. To integrate the scheduling expert systems for shipbuilding, we used a hierarchical scheduling architecture. To automate the dynamic spatial layout of objects in various areas of the shipyard, we developed spatial scheduling expert systems.