Development of the Abstract Test Cases of Ship STEP

Ship STEP(Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data) which is composed of AP 215 (Ship Arrangement), AP 216(Ship Hull Form), AP 218 (Ship Structure), has been developed more than last 10 years and it is now at the stage just before IS(International Standard). It is expected that ship STEP would be used for the seamless data exchange among various CAD/CAM/CAE systems of shipbuilding process. In this paper the huge and complicated data structure of ship STEP is briefly reviewed at the level of ARM(Application Reference Model) and some abstract test cases which will be included as part of the standards are introduced. Basically ship STEP has common data model to be used without losing compatibility among those three different ship AP's, and it is defined as the modeling framework. Typical cases of data exchange during shipbuilding process, such as hull form data exchange between design office and model basin, midship structure data between shipbuilding yard and classification society are reviewed and STEP physical data are generated using commercial geometric modeling kernel. Test cases of ship arrangement at initial design stage and hydrodynamic data of crude oil carrier are also included.