Shipbuilding with AI — one badly finished seam on the slipway is a month of delay.

The problem

Hundred-ton blocks, seams tens of meters long, and a dossier that has to add up.

A modern shipyard does not fail on the welder's skill — it fails on the structural variability of a process that is 90% manual over enormous pieces. Three typical pains coexist:

1. The long seam — the automated head does its part, but the manual finish, the crew change, the shift change and the awkward posture inject variability. A pore or a lack of fusion caught late means hours of regrinding and re-welding, gas, electrode and a block standing still.
2. Block alignment — prefabricated blocks weighing tens or hundreds of tons, positioned on the slipway with cranes. The millimeters add up on pieces 20-50 meters long. What is caught late is scrap or brutally heavy rework.
3. The class dossier — the classification society (DNV, Lloyd's, ABS, Bureau Veritas) and the shipowner ask for piece-by-piece traceability: WPS applied, certified welder, material certificates, NDT performed. Today it is rebuilt by hand from Excels, emails and paper signatures when the surveyor arrives.

The technical director lives in all three worlds, and the bottleneck is not the plant — it is that the information travels by email, over the slipway foreman's radio and in the project controller's folder. Every block delivered late is months of project that will never be recovered.

How it fits the IRIS system

iLEAN does not change the welding head or the PLM — it seals the crack between the slipway, the WPS and the surveyor.

The shipyard's problem is not buying more automation: it is that the welding head, the PLM, the paint system, the plate supplier's certificate and the slipway foreman's plan do not talk to each other in real time. iLEAN acts as putty between the systems and the human islands, without asking you to change the ESAB robot or the Aveva PLM.

Edge sees the seam as it is laid and triggers the alert before the block moves to the next station. Connect captures WPS, materials and block plan from wherever they live. The agent assembles the class dossier. The welding inspector signs — the system never closes on its own.

The three iLEAN pieces applied to a shipyard:

• iLEAN Edge — CNN-equipped cameras on the semi-automatic welding head and on mobile stations for manual welding. They detect visible porosity, lack of fusion by geometry, undercut and out-of-spec spatter. For block alignment, an Edge with stereo vision + laser measures flatness and the match between mated pieces. It works without a network, because the slipway is an environment where WiFi is erratic.
• iLEAN Connect — reads the block plan from the PLM (Aveva, Cadmatic, Foran), the WPS from the welding coordinator, the supplier's plate certificates that arrive as PDFs, the delivery note for gas and paint. It also captures the slipway foreman's WhatsApp warning that block 3.4 is running an hour late — and the agents replan at second zero, without calling a meeting.
• iLEAN Agents — the agent cross-references seam ↔ welder ↔ WPS ↔ material certificate and assembles the dossier for the DNV/Lloyd's/ABS/BV surveyor. It does not sign: it prepares the dossier and hands it to the certified welding inspector, who is the one who signs. It closes the case of the "boring, very specific file" a surveyor asks for and that empties an office for weeks.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Manual shipyard + Excel vs. shipyard cross-referenced with iLEAN

Aspect	Manual + Excel + email	With iLEAN Edge + Connect + Agents
Weld seam defect	Caught by the inspector on a pass + radiography	CNN flags it as it happens, before the next block
WPS ↔ seam ↔ welder traceability	Welder sheet in a folder, signed at end of shift	Automatic association at second zero
Block alignment	Tape, plumb line, the slipway foreman's eye	Edge with vision + laser, deviation map
Anticorrosion coating	Spot readings with a digital gauge	Full block pattern + low-thickness zones
Dossier for DNV/Lloyd's/ABS/BV	Rebuilt from Excel and paper signatures	Per-block dossier prepared by the agent
Operation without a network	n/a	Edge keeps capturing on the slipway, syncs when back

Impact estimate

Impact estimate for your plant — to be validated with your numbers.

The block below is an estimate to be validated with the specific data of your shipyard. We put it forward so the committee has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the diagnostic.

• Shipyard with 1-3 active slipways + prefabrication shop, continuous-seam robot + manual welding + paint booth, recurring class dossier.
• Edge pilot on one semi-automatic welding head + one mobile station over a manual seam. First value expected within a few weeks.
• Expected weld rework reduction ≥30%, class dossier preparation time reduced ≥50%. Indicative payback between 4 and 9 months, depending on how often blocks need seam rework and on the technical director's hours devoted to class.
• The hard lever is blocks delivered on schedule: every week of delay on a block piles onto the timeline of the entire vessel.

And the technical director's reasonable doubt

“What if the CNN invents a defect on a seam or, worse, misses a real lack of fusion?” — hallucination is a problem of free generation, not of anchored tasks. Flagging candidate defects on a seam and comparing them against the WPS reference is an anchored task: the best models brought error below 1.5% ^[1]. And even so, the system does not decide — it proposes, flags, records. The welding inspector's signature stays exactly where it belongs. The three safety rings exist precisely for this: the decision on a critical seam is not closed by an AI, it is closed by a certified person.

^[1] OpenAI paper “Why Language Models Hallucinate”, 2025 — on the reliability of AI in anchored tasks.

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