ABSTRACT
Technology innovation, dynamic market conditions, changing customer requirements are trends and influences that ship design and shipbuilding companies cannot escape from. This situation represents an increase in the complexity of the conceptualization, designing and building of ships, which often is cited as a reason for system development difficulty and or failure in the delivery of new buildings—time, price and or quality wise. To improve the effectiveness of the design and construction processes of vessel new buildings, complexity should be understood, and handled in an effective way. This paper discusses the conceptual design complexity in cruise ship design and presents a practical approach to handle such complexity in early design phases. We propose the application of multi variate data analysis and multi criteria decision making approaches as an effective way to handle the conceptual design decision making complexity of cruise ships. Several practical design cases/problems are presented and discussed in this paper to demonstrate the issue at hand.
