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Modern military ships are requested to be efficient and versatile, compliant with multiple requirements (e.g. payload and personnel reconfiguration, ability to conduct humanitarian and defense missions, etc) and ideally operated by a reduced crew. 
During the design phase it is therefore mandatory to conduct studies not only on ship subsystems and their performance, but also on the crew itself, aiming at: (1) producing a Scheme Of Complement based on ship capabilities and Navy’s regulations, (2) assessing its capability to operate the vessel in the conduction of the required missions and (3) evaluating the impact of workload on the crew deriving from demanding situations.
CETENA and Fincantieri have developed a tool able to successfully fulfill the whole process, assisting the designer in carrying out both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The first step is producing an hypothetical Scheme Of Complement; since its composition is heavily influenced by the Navy’s regulation and ship’s characteristics, the best approach is using knowledge and experience. These information have been organized into rules that can effectively be used to automatically determine a first educated guess for crew composition.
The following step is calculating the workload for each crew member across a set of typical missions. The procedure allocates tasks to the personnel according to their skill, rank and affiliation to onboard teams. Once the workload is calculated (on hourly basis) it is possible to review it critically; based on the results the original crew composition can be assessed or possibly modified and tasks assignment be run again. The procedure can also assess the capability of the crew to face extraordinary events, with useful indications on the activities it is necessary to discontinue for facing the additional workload (e.g. a search and rescue operation).
Future developments of this approach are also discussed, especially considering onboard in-mission application.