Dependable design of all electric ships integrated power system: New design process

All Electric Ships (AESs) are becoming a standard for what it concerns large ships with large power requirements (for both propulsion and onboard loads). At present, the design of shipboard complex power system (namely the IPS - Integrated Power System) is done through a well-proven process, relying on historical data and trial-and-error procedures developed in nearly 30 years of design experience. However, the evolution in shipboard power systems (mainly due to more demanding requirements on Quality of Service and safety) is pushing towards new IPS architectures and subsystems, not covered by previous knowledge. Due to that, the conventional design process is becoming inefficient, thus demanding new design paradigms. In this regard, innovative concepts and tools can be adopted to achieve a “new design process”. In this paper, after a brief analysis of conventional design process, a proposal about such a new design process is done, integrating both dependability theory and the dynamic power system simulators. Insights about its inclusion in conventional design process are also given, together with an application example, used to show the effectiveness of such a new process.