The EcoPlex Project, to reduce the environmental footprint of ships

In the context of global warming, the International Maritime Organization has committed to reducing the carbon emissions of the world fleet by 40% between 2008 and 2030. Achieving this objective will necessarily involve reducing the environmental impact of ships.

One of the ways to improve this is to intervene as early as the design phase of a new vessel, by assessing its impact on the environment as soon as possible in order to make the best possible eco-design choices.

This is the main challenge of the EcoPlex project: to provide a methodological approach and a software solution adapted to shipbuilding, to reconcile the systems engineering approach (design discipline of complex systems) with that of life cycle analysis (assessment of the environmental impacts of a product over its entire life cycle).

Supported by the EMC2 competitiveness cluster and financed by Bpifrance and the Brittany and Pays de la Loire regions, this collaborative project brings together several companies and laboratories specializing in key areas, including:

Obeo: software publisher, member of the Capella ecosystem (open-source systems engineering software),

Stirling Design International (SDI): a naval design and architecture agency,

Manta Innovation: the naval and environmental design and engineering firm of The SeaCleaners,

Efinor Sea Cleaner: a shipyard specializing in the design, manufacture and marketing of multi-service cleanup vessels,

Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes (LS2N): a CNRS public research laboratory, with two cross-cutting themes on “Energy management and control of environmental impacts” and “The Enterprise of the Future”.

Starting in June 2021 and lasting eighteen months, the EcoPlex project plans to provide an innovative solution to ensure digital continuity between the design activities of a ship and the life cycle analysis of this same ship.

The naval eco-design approach, developed with the help of SDI, will be supported by software developed by Obeo and LS2N to interoperate the open-source software Capella (system engineering) and OpenLCA (life cycle analysis).

The solution will first be tested on our two offshore plastic collection vessels, Mobula 8 and 10.
Designed by Manta Innovation to meet the needs of The SeaCleaners, these sea cleaning boats will be designed and manufactured by Efinor Sea Cleaner. A third experiment will then be carried out by SDI on an eco-designed vessel for passenger transport.

Read the press release