The concept phase of the naval ship design process is traditionally based on experience, on the balanced application of project constraints, on prescriptive  rules and experimental information. In the so-called early-stage design it’s favorable a close interaction between client (usually MoDs), designers and experts of naval weapon systems and equipment C4I (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence).

The goal of this project is to develop a tool for a multi-dimensional evaluation of the operational effectiveness of a combatant ship: it will allow to extract knowledge (knowledge elicitation) by experts from the navy in order to specify, in a structured way, the level of significance of different physical solutions and possible configurations characterizing a naval unit with respect to the operational scenarios of interest. In the international arena this purpose is identified as: "Strategic Requirements Planning".

Several NATO groups have highlighted two parallel technical trends that are emerging to address an immediate and instantaneous (run-time) analysis of design choices’ impacts on the overall capacity of the naval unit.

The first stand up for a new methodology supporting the preliminary phase of the acquisition process of a unit, based on parametric modeling of ship design aspects as well as those related to the operational evaluation; the latter proposes the integration of the "expert opinion". In this perspective, in the present paper the tool for knowledge elicitation will be described and discussed with specific attention to the ship technical characteristics able to describe consistently the naval unit under investigation in terms of operational capabilities, through the use of systems functional decomposition. A methodology and a tool will be therefore identified with the aim to rationally link the main ship design characteristics to operational effectiveness through systems functions.