Requirements elucidation is a significant part of early-stage ship design, especially in naval architecture for complex ships. During a vessel’s acquisition process, the stakeholders propose requirements in statements, regulations, Concepts of Operations (CONOPS), vignettes, and Minutes of Meetings, all expressed in natural language. However, bridging these natural language requirements and their impact on the final design remains an open research problem. This research proposes a framework that utilizes semantics interpretation to map the natural language requirements (R) to the layers of the systems architecture: Functional (F), Logical (L), and Physical (P). This paper proposes to use semantics to better understand the effect of requirements on design change occurring in the logical and physical architecture layers of the system architecture. This research also introduces the classification of the requirements on a two-dimensional axis system, with one axis being their importance to the stakeholders and the other axis evaluating their elasticity (i.e., if they can be interpreted in more than one way). This classification provides insights into the characteristics of requirements that may impact the physical design. The proposed framework shows potential for identifying and tracing the propagation of changes and uncertainties stemming from the requirements to the other layers of the systems architecture. This paper showcases the framework through a case study on the semantic interpretation of redundancy and safety regulations for the design of a short-sea vessel’s engine room. The results show that hard” and ”elastic” safety requirements are more influential on the layout arrangement and
thus the shape of the generated design space.

The increasing complexity of modern naval vessels due to technological advancements poses challenges for early-stage ship design (ESSD). Developing well-defined system architectures and adopting systems engineering approaches are essential to address these challenges. Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) has emerged as a solution to the issues inherent in traditional document-centric methods and is considered the future of systems engineering. This paper aims to address the barriers to MBSE adoption by exploring its value in the early design stage of naval vessels. The paper focuses on system architecture development, covering operational, functional, logical, and physical perspectives, and evaluates two MBSE tools: Capella and CDP4-COMET. The analysis demonstrates that both tools effectively validate anticipated benefits, concluding that MBSE can enhance and accelerate ESSD, with Capella performing better in the early design stages and CDP4–COMET excelling in the later stages. This paper, thus, differentiates itself from traditional performance and detailed design modeling, such as those addressing motion, control, or thermal dynamics.