ABSTRACT
The international competition in shipbuilding is a subject that weighs heavily in new ships orders and leads to the study about the feasibility of adopting new technologies and processes in the production flow, in order to respond to the current challenges. Thus, a program was developed to forecast times and costs in the construction processes stages of ship blocks in a shipbuilding yard, allowing the simulation of implementation of alternative cutting and welding technologies. The main goal of this study is to understand the relation between operational and labor costs in various types of cutting and welding technologies, and the potential earnings related to cost savings in downstream stages of the production flow due to the application of higher quality technologies in upstream processes. The times and cost values computed by the developed algorithm grant a deeper understanding of the consequences of the adoption of alternative shipbuilding technologies in the productive process.
