A new EU-funded Smart European Shipbuilding project (SEUS) has launched this month, backed by a consortium of industrial companies and academic institutions and aiming to create a framework for data-driven shipbuilding by developing an integrated platform that incorporates ship design systems, data management, and collaboration software.
The platform hopes to reduce the time needed for ship engineering by 30% and cut assembly times by up to 20%, incorporating the latest practices in human-centric knowledge management and data-driven AI design elements to create an ‘Industry 5.0’ concept for shipbuilding.
The project also aims to support the growth of a European workforce that is highly skilled in the deployment and use of advanced computational tools in shipbuilding, particularly with respect to the integration of new technologies.
The SEUS consortium includes eight organisations from five countries, including shipbuilding tech provider Cadmatic of Finland, which will lead the technical coordination of the four-year project.
Other group members include PLM systems developer Contact Software (Germany), SARC BV (The Netherlands), the two shipyards Ulstein Group (Norway) and Astilleros Gondan SA (Spain), and research institutes Turku University (Finland), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway), and NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands).
SEUS is part of Horizon Europe, an EU research and innovation programme with a budget of €95.5 billion. SEUS is funded to the tune of approximately €7 million, of which Cadmatic will receive €1.6 million.
“We are proud to be leading the technical coordination and working alongside the other consortium partners on this ambitious project. It is very exciting to use our shipbuilding expertise to incorporate CAE/CAD/CAM and PLM elements in a single innovative and ground-breaking platform that will take shipbuilding efficiency to the next level,” said Ludmila Seppälä, Business Development Director at Cadmatic.
