Towards a modular product architecture for electric ferries using Model-Based Systems Engineering

With the reduction of the allowed emission values, the need for fast and emission-free passenger transport is growing - even on coastal or inner city waterways. Many cities and regions are therefore striving to quickly replace their existing conventional diesel ferries with electrically powered passenger ferries. Shipbuilding, however, is characterized by individual applications and corresponding one-off productions. While the concept of modularization has proven itself in many industries to realize individual products in a short development time, such approaches are hardly found in the maritime industry. In particular, the high degree of dependency between the individual system elements of a ship represents a major challenge in the development of modular ships and ship architectures. This dependencies are further increased in the case of electrically driven high-speed ships, which in the present case are used for passenger transport in urban areas. This paper presents an approach for identifying reusable and standardized modules in shipbuilding for high-speed vessels using Model-Based Systems Engineering methods. The goal of the approach is to create a multi-domain system model that enables developers to identify use-case spanning standard modules and interfaces.