CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Introduction.
1. A war ship is a complex weapon platform that has to operate in a battle zone in order
to successfully fulfil its role and mission. In order to perform its role a warship is
equipped with different types of weapons that help it tackle different types of targets
i.e. a warship is capable of performing Anti Surface Warfare, Anti-Submarine warfare
and Anti Air Warfare by using different weapons present on-board the ship,
collectively known as the weapon payload of the ship.
2. One of the initial tasks in the design spiral of designing a war ship is to select the
payload. This involves selection of weapons that are to be deployed on the ship. This
process can be time consuming and tedious as the number of weapons available for
a designer are not limited in this era. If the selection process can be made more
systematic and simpler the designer would make the selection more efficiently and
the design process would be faster saving both resources and time.

Motivation.
3. The payload selection of the warship is one of the most important steps in the design
spiral as the designer has to design the entire ship around the selected payload. It is
however this process of payload selection that proves to be time consuming and
tedious.
4. The final selection may not always be the best as the selection process is not well
defined. The process may involve a number of decision makers and stake holders
with different views on what is best. This results in a selection that has been affected
by personal preferences and biases.
5. It is to avoid these discrepancies in the selection procedure that it was decided to
develop a tool for the selection of payload for a ship by employing one of the
numerous Multi Criteria Decision Making tools that allows the decision makers to
make a logical and well-structured decision and gives a balanced view of how
suitable a selected option is.

Project Intent

6. The problem was studied and the project intent was arrived at. The intent of the
project was defined to be as follows.
a. Development of a selection tool that performs the following tasks.
i.
Rank weapons based on operational performance and customer
ii.
iii.

requirements.
Do a cost capability analysis for the various options.
Combine the above results and do the final selection.
b. Generic tool for similar selection problems.

Research Objectives.
7. Once the intent of the project was established the research objectives were defined.
The aim of defining the research objectives was collection of information, data,
documents that would aid in the development of an appropriate tool for weapon
selection. The research objectives are as follows.
a.
Study of different Multi Criteria Decision Making Tools
b.
Detailed study of criteria for selection of weapons.
c.
Study of ways to implement the MCDM model.
d.
Feasibility study of application of model to other problems.

Approach Adopted
8. The following approach was adopted for the project, in order to reach at the final
deliverable of the project.
a.
Literature review. This involved the study of literature from various
journals and technical papers.
b.
Interaction with subject matter experts. The interaction with subject
matter experts from different fields continued throughout the span of the
project.
c.
Selection of an appropriate Multi criteria decision making tool that was
to be used for the development of a solution to the weapon selection problem.
d.
Development of the tool that implements the developed model using a
suitable software. Testing of tool using already available data.
Application of the tool to the problem of weapon selection and other

e.

similar problems.