The shipbuilding industry, whether large, medium or small, must be competitive on the world market. Concept Industry 4.0 provides the shipbuilding industry with the ability to respond to the changing demands of the global shipbuilding market, expressed in terms of shorter building time period, as well as increasingly personalized customer access to shipyards with individualized technical solutions that meet all ecological and ergonomic requirements in ship exploitation. This implies continous monitoring of the development of new materials and technologies and apply them both in product design and even more significantly in the production phase. In order to contribute to the competitiveness of Croatian shipbuilding in the world market, special attention will be given to improving the design methodology of the shipbuilding process and to the interaction with other stages of the ship's design and to the implementation of the Industry 4.0 concept that encouraged the shipbuilding sector to consider transforming the entire shipbuilding process from the design, production, functionality of ships, inter-transport and services. It is considered that the shipbuilding industry at the beginning of the new industrial revolution is stimulated by digitization, optimization and linking process. The aim of the research is to develop the knowledge and methods, techniques and tools to optimize this methodology, primarily based on the Industry 4.0 concept, in order to reduce the consumption of labor resources per unit of production and to shorten the time of shipbuilding. An additional objective of the project is further development of lab for the application of advanced technologies in small and medium shipbuilding and lab for computation engineering, as part of the creation of a competitive engineering environment. The laboratory would develop tools for collaborative design of products and processes to simulate and analyze the potential application of the Industry 4.0 concept.