The shipbuilding industry, especially the ship design, faces major opportunities and challenges with the promotion of digitalization. While the digital design improves the quality and efficiency of the ship design, there are still many difficulties in the ship design. The current urgent issues to be considered are to further optimize the design process, improve the efficiency, reduce the cost and achieve the autonomous control through digital technology. Innovative countermeasures are provided by analyzing the possible difficulties that may arise from the integration of the ship design and the digital technology. Furthermore, the current study introduces how the ship digital design platform achieves a breakthrough in general ship design through the unified object-oriented data management core and the time-period refresh mechanism. It explores a technical route of independent development characteristics for the research and development of ship digital design software with independent intellectual property rights.

This paper introduces the composition of a built-in three-cable positioning system and the configuration and function of the special components for the self-propelled cutter suction dredgers. This three-cable positioning system can work in the rough sea conditions without the limitation of the deck area for the self-propelled cutter suction dredger, and can reduce the impact on the resistance. It can significantly improve the operability and the economy of large self-propelled cutter suction dredgers.

The arrangement of bow anchor equipment for some large ships is very difficult because of the excessive equipment on the deck, the limitation of special bow lines and super-large bulb nose. Three different schemes of the anchor arrangement and their corresponding anchor bed are analyzed for large cutter suction dredgers to find the arrangement scheme and new anchor bed that are suitable for the bow lines and complex deck equipment. The finally adopted new anchor bed is different from the ordinary anchor bed, best using the current space to reach the optimum state of the reception and release of the anchor.