What distinguishes the OCX standard from other shipbuilding standards?

PROSTEP has made an analysis of the OCX standard and compared it with the current standards in use by the maritime shipbuilding industry. PROSTEP presented their analysis at the Consortium kikc-off meeting on February 3, 2021. The main takeaways were summarised in the slide below and emphasizes three aspects of the OCX standard:

  1. A topological model
  2. Shipbuilding semantics and features
  3. Spatial and logical structure of compartments and tanks

OCX is a format to support topological and feature based (shipbuilding design) semantics not found in
existing exchange formats (such as IGES, STEP, JT) for class approval related data exchange scenarios in order to complement (and eventually replace) (paper-) drawings.

PROSTEP also places the OCX format in a process context and highlights necessary improvement/development areas such as

  • outbound/inbound data transfer needs,
  • archiving of approval process data,
  • comment exchange
  • and IP protection.

All items are subject to further work by the Consortium Memebrs and standard implementers and need to come in place to provide value to the users.