How to find the most suitable power plant during early-stage design?

For economic and environmental reasons, commercial vessels increasingly need to be optimised towards their mission. This optimisation mainly influences the onboard power plant, since this is a large contributor to the operational costs of a ship and the main source of emissions on board. At the same time it becomes ever more challenging to find the power plant that best matches the wishes of a client during early-stage design, as the number of alternative fuels, system components and power plant configurations increase exponentially. Thus, there is an increasing need amongst system designers for advanced methods for concept or design space exploration in order to better understand how requirements, constraints, technical design solutions and performance characteristics relate.