Objectives  During ship design, designers often need to extract models of a zone, system or cabin from total ship models.

  Methods  Aiming at the application demand for distilling cabin models and taking the Jupiter Tessellation(JT) models exported by FORAN as the research object, an automatic technique for 3D cabin model extraction is developed based on the JT format. By analyzing the composition of cabin models, the information embodied in the diversified models composing the cabin, the relationship between the cabin and that information, and the product code, zone number, construction segment number and coordinates of a cabin's bounding boxes are identified as the retrieving conditions of the cabin model. Based on predefined distilling terms by users and the objects' types, names and coordinates of JT models' bounding boxes in the Product Lifecycle Management(PLM)platform, all the parts contained in a cabin can be efficiently distilled from the model of the whole ship. Furthermore, all the obtained models are assembled as a single JT model which possesses the same assembly configuration as the ship's Bill of Materials(BOM)structure.

  Results  Finally, a tool which can search for one or many cabin models is implemented on the basis of the proposed method with a JT lightweight model management system,

  Conclusions  and the gained cabin's JT model can be further used for collocation harmonizing, clearance analysis, virtual review, etc.