Help Guide · 24 October 2026 Edition
AI-PNA Help Center
Complete guide to the multi-expert assistant for naval architecture, marine engineering, and geoscience workflows.
What is new in this edition (1 November 2026)
- Barge design (3.12, new): ask for a barge for your deck cargo and the Marine Transportation expert selects one. It tries the typical flat-top barges of oil and gas and offshore wind work first (250 to 600 ft), and designs a barge to suit only when none of them passes. Every barge tried is checked for deck fit, stability (intact and one compartment damaged), hull girder bending and shear, deck load, seafastening, towing, draught and freeboard. The lightest that passes is selected, with its sensitivity and the design considerations still open.
- Load-out and ballast (3.12, new): a cargo skidded or driven on SPMTs onto a barge at a quay, in stages, on the tide. For every stage the expert gives the ballast in each tank that keeps the deck level with the quay, the keel clearance, the pumping rate against your pumps, and the stability. It also gives the ballast plan for the tow.
- Jacket design (4.7): the pile penetration is sized for the storm cases, with scour, the lateral capacity of the piles and the joints where braces cross. The answer lists every jacket design consideration and says which were computed, which were screened, which go to another expert and which need your input.
- Subsea structures (3.21) and floaters (4.6): more screening checks.
- Subsea structures: mudmat overturning and settlement, landing and retrieval loads, pile lateral capacity, VIV of members in the current, and suction bucket installation.
- Floaters: the heel limit and tower-base moment of a floating wind turbine, the air gap, the cathodic protection of an FPSO hull, and vortex-induced motions (VIM).
- Stricter checks: some results that used to be reported without counting against the design now fail it: an overturning mudmat, a failed lift, a slack sling, fibre rope on the seabed, drag-anchor uplift, and FPSO hull results. A design that passed before may now show a failure: it is real.
- Sensitivity of the design: jacket, subsea structure and barge designs are re-checked with the uncertain inputs varied: waves and current +10 %, masses +10 %, soil strength −20 %. The answer and the technical note say which inputs would make the design fail. When a lighter design is found automatically, it is kept only if it is not more sensitive.
- Automatic redesign and optimisation: a design that fails is redesigned in one automatic round before it comes to you for review. A design that passes with a large margin can be made lighter in an optimisation round. The answer says what changed.
- The data the experts need, asked when needed: before an analysis, you check the values read from your query and confirm them. When an expert needs data you did not give, the review form asks for it. Where possible it suggests a value: one you confirmed in an earlier analysis, or, if you tick Look up missing data on the web on the query form, one stated by a web source, shown with its source. Nothing suggested is used unless you accept it or change it. Web lookups are charged per search.
- Watched analyses: on the dashboard, choose any of your analyses to watch. Every week it is re-run on the current calculation engines, and you are told if the design no longer passes, now passes, or its governing utilisation has risen by more than 10 %.
- When an analysis stops: the dashboard tells you what happened and what to do (for example, reconnect your drive or try again later), and the AI-PNA administrator is alerted. The system also checks itself every night.
- Mesh viewer: the subsea frame for each load case with its load arrows and joints, the fatigue results of the mooring and floater experts, and the jacket in 3D, with labels that do not overlap.
Previous edition (24 October 2026)
- Eight new experts in Class B (Part 3), each with its own calculation engine, a drawing and a file that opens in the viewer:
- Dynamic Cables & Risers (3.14): catenary and lazy-wave cables, umbilicals and flexible risers, with the allowable vessel offsets for the mooring. Expert page
- Wind Turbine Loads (3.15): rotor thrust and power curves, operating, extreme and parked loads, tower base loads, heeling of a floating unit. Expert page
- Geotechnical Engineering (3.16): soil profile from layers or CPT, pile capacity, shallow foundations, spudcan penetration and punch-through, scour. Expert page
- Risk & Safety (3.17): risk registers, event and fault trees, PLL, F-N curves, individual risk, dropped objects, fire radiation, ALARP. Expert page
- Cost & Economics (3.18): CAPEX, OPEX, decommissioning, LCOE, NPV, IRR, payback, option comparison and P10/P50/P90. Expert page
- Resistance & Propulsion (3.19): speed-power, B-series propeller design, planing hulls, wake field, hull dimension optimisation, CFD set-up. Expert page
- Pipelines & Subsea (3.20): wall thickness (DNV-ST-F101), on-bottom stability, free spans, pipelay, upheaval buckling, cathodic protection. Expert page
- Subsea Structures (3.21): PLET, in-line tees, manifolds, templates, riser bases, SSIV and protection structures, UTA: frame, mudmat or piles, lift and splash zone, anodes. Expert page
- Your metocean design basis (2.1): metocean values you state as the project's own design basis are used as given and the compliance review is made on them (saying so), instead of treating them as generic assumptions.
- Semi-taut moorings sized for you: ask for chain-polyester-chain lines without sizes and the mooring engine sizes the chain and the rope, keeps the polyester off the seabed in every intact and damaged state, and keeps any composition, chain or segment length you do give. See Part 3, 3.5 Mooring Design and 3.8 Floating Wind Mooring.
- Mesh viewer: the files of the new experts open with their drawings and 3D configuration, and the names of the files in the view are shown in small print in the top left corner (also in the saved PNG).
- Enhance query (optional): before you run, Enhance query checks your draft against what the AI-PNA experts need for it. It lists the experts the question will call, what each is missing (required or recommended), the questions that matter most and typical values you may accept instead of data, and gives the query back reorganised, with
[[placeholders]]where your values are missing. It never invents a value: numbers that were not in your draft are pointed out for you to check. Edit the text, then Use this query or keep your own; nothing is run until you submit. The form reminds you of any placeholder left in the query. - Technical note (optional): when a query has finished, Make technical note on the dashboard turns its results into a technical note in Word (.docx) and PDF: a title page with the document number, revision, date and prepared / checked / approved boxes, a revision record, the purpose and scope, a summary table of the disciplines, the design basis, one section per expert with its key results and checks, the conclusions, recommendations, limitations and open items, and the list of the analysis files. The text is written for you; every number in the tables is copied from the experts' stored results, and any number in the text that is not found there is listed in Appendix B and on the dashboard, to check before issue. The note is saved to your Google Drive or OneDrive (or offered for download) and can be made while the results are kept (30 days).
Earlier edition (22 October 2026)
- Trusses and hybrid structures (new): slender tubular members by Morison's equation, on their own (a floating truss, a fixed truss) or added to a panel body. Members come from a member table or the beam elements of a structural model. The mooring, stability, jacket and structures experts use the members too, and the OrcaFlex expert writes an OrcFxAPI script that builds them.
- Floating wind platforms of columns and braces (new): a platform of large columns joined by braces (with or without pontoons and heave plates) goes through every expert as a ship does: RAOs and natural periods, motions and nacelle accelerations, mooring, offshore stability criteria, and brace fatigue from a frame model, reported the same way as for a ship.
- Quality checks across the experts (new): one set of masses for every expert, input checks before a result is trusted (a unit that does not float at its draught, a negative GM, a KG different from the run), and a session check that lists any disagreement between the experts for review.
- One file to reuse a vessel: attach
<name>_vessel_reuse.jsonfrom an earlier run to a new query; it holds the mesh, the RAOs, the members and everything else the experts need. - Mesh viewer: tubular members (from a members file or a vessel reuse file) drawn as tubes, coloured by diameter or by drag share.
- Files in your drive and in Airtable: with Google Drive or OneDrive connected, the report and the experts' files go to the AI-PNA folder on your drive and a copy (up to 5 MB) to the Files column of your Airtable table.
- Heave and pitch damping: give the damping as a percentage of critical (heave plates, model tests) and the hydro run includes it in the motions and the mean drift; a natural period with almost no damping is flagged for review.
- Wind on the whole unit: give the deck, tower, turbine and equipment above the water (sizes, or a drawing) and a wind speed: the experts compute the wind force and the height it acts at, use it in the mooring and stability, and the mesh viewer draws the whole unit above the meshed hull.
- Dashboard: in a review request, each review trigger is on its own numbered line (a trigger with several items lists each item below it), and lists such as the outstanding items show one item per line.
Earlier edition (18 October 2026)
- Computed RAOs (5.8): when no RAOs exist, the ai-pna_wave expert meshes the hull and the AI-PNA hydro solver (open-source Capytaine, linear potential flow) computes the RAOs, load RAOs, added mass and damping, mean wave drift and motions at named points, with viscous roll damping added by Ikeda's method. The results are labelled as AI-PNA hydro solver results, never as OrcaWave results.
- One vessel through the session: once a vessel has been meshed and solved, a mooring, lift, transport, installation or stability task asked later in the same session (in a review round too) is done for that vessel, without asking for its dimensions again. How it works.
- Start from an earlier run: attach the files of an earlier AI-PNA hydro run to a new query and the experts use that vessel and its RAOs as if the run were in the session. Which files to attach.
- Crane anywhere on the deck: give the crane base anywhere on the vessel, its radius, tip height and slew angles, and Hydrodynamics computes the crane tip motions from the vessel's RAOs for the Offshore Lift expert.
- Stability (3.2): the GZ curve on the meshed hull itself at large angles (free trim, cross curves, IS Code criteria, limiting KG), a GZ curve drawing, and a stability file that opens in the viewer's new Stability mode.
- Mesh viewer: Stability mode, a session view that puts the mesh, the mooring and the lift of one session in one scene, and Add files; opening new files clears the previous view.
- Ask one expert: the query form has an Expert list. Auto (the default) lets AI-PNA plan the run and call every expert the question needs; choosing an expert from your plan has that expert alone answer, faster but without cross-discipline checks or the compliance review, which the answer states.
- ai-pna_wave (new, 5.8): brings RAOs from WAMIT, AQWA, HydroD/Wadam, MOSES, NEMOH, Capytaine, model tests or OrcaFlex into OrcaFlex with every convention made explicit and checked, writes OrcaFlex vessel types, RAO tables and panel meshes, and sets up OrcaWave models so you can develop the RAOs yourself. OrcaWave itself is never run.
- NAPA (new, 5.7): advice on NAPA work, review of NAPA models and reports, independent cross-checks of NAPA numbers (hydrostatics, loading conditions, GZ and intact criteria, subdivision and damage indices, inclining test, longitudinal strength, hull girder, tank tables, loading computer tests and grain), macro drafting and the class approval route. NAPA itself is never run.
- Finite Element upgraded (5.2): with no package named, the expert builds an open-source model (CalculiX, OpenSeesPy or scikit-fem) that AI-PNA runs, then adopts or rejects the results; with a commercial package named, it writes that package's deck and runs an open-source check.
- Machine learning now has its own part: Part 6, Advanced Intelligent Tools.
- 2D sections in a flow (new): define one or more sections of any shape in the viewer's Fluid domain mode; the ML expert's flow2d template gives the added mass, drag CD, damping and the flow field, shown in the viewer.
- Trained ML models in the viewer: the training curve, predicted against actual, errors and feature importance, a what-if on the trained model, and its predictions coloured on the hull.
- New order: site data (Class A, Part 2) now comes straight after How AI-PNA Works, followed by Engineering (Class B), Design leads (Class C) and Analysis tools (Class D). The class letters now match the expert bundles on the Plans page.
System Setup
AI-PNA saves everything to your own Airtable table. Connect it once on the Settings page.
Airtable Connection
| API Token | Personal access token starting with pat... |
| Base ID | Starts with app... |
| Table ID | Starts with tbl... |
Required scopes: data.records:read, data.records:write.
Table Column Setup
| Name | Type |
|---|---|
| userId | Single line text |
| query | Long text |
| summary | Long text |
| Expert | Single line text |
| Status | Single line text |
| Code | Long text |
| sessionId | Single line text |
| Files | Attachment |
The Files attachment column (type Attachment, not text) holds the files AI-PNA saves: the report, the files the experts generate (decks, meshes, vessel types) and your attachments, up to 5 MB each. Connect Google Drive or OneDrive in Settings and every file is also saved in an AI-PNA folder on that drive (files up to 25 MB): you get both, the folder in your drive and a copy in Airtable. A file over 5 MB goes to the drive only; if the drive refuses a file, the Airtable copy keeps it.
Part 1
The AI-PNA System
Part 2
Class A: Geoscience & Environment
Site data every other expert builds on: the design environment, seabed and soil conditions, and subsurface reservoir data. Metocean is normally called first.
Critical input: water depth & location
Part 3
Class B: Engineering Disciplines
Part 4
Class C: Design Leads
Part 5
Class D: Analysis & Calculation Tools
These experts run calculations, simulations and models on request, or review and cross-check the ones you supply. They execute; the owning expert adopts or rejects their results. Machine learning is described in Part 6, Advanced Intelligent Tools.
Part 6
Advanced Intelligent Tools
Tools that work across the whole system rather than in one discipline. They support the physics-based experts in Parts 2 to 5 and never replace them.
Part 7
Final Review
7.1 Regulatory Compliance
Final integrated review
Always called last. It screens the technical results against IMO conventions, flag law, class rules and coastal State regimes, and routes approval questions to the right authority.
Decision Support Only
8. Important Notice
AI-PNA provides technical guidance for engineering consideration. All results must be verified by qualified naval architects, marine or offshore engineers, geoscientists or metocean specialists, as appropriate.
Regulatory and classification content is preliminary guidance and is not a compliance determination, legal opinion or approval. Final designs require review and approval by the relevant classification society and authorities.