Four decades at the intersection of ship design and digital technology

Michael A. Polini has spent more than four decades at the intersection of naval architecture and digital technology, shaping the way the world's shipbuilders design, model, and build vessels. Trained as a Naval Architect at the University of Michigan, he began his career performing structural and stability analyses on commercial and naval ships before making the leap into the then-emerging world of CAD/CAM — a move that would define the rest of his professional life.

At Newport News Shipbuilding, he was one of the principal architects of a DARPA-funded object-oriented product modeling system that gave rise to the concept of the “Smart Product Model” — an approach now embedded in the DNA of modern shipbuilding software. He later directed global software development for a consortium of world-class shipbuilders, producing the modeling application that became Intergraph's Smart 3D platform.

As Executive Product Director at Intergraph and then Hexagon PPM, he worked for fifteen years with leading shipyards across Asia, Europe and North America, guiding complex enterprise deployments and building the digital bridges between design, classification, and production. Since retiring in 2020, Michael has continued to consult with Hexagon on marine customer interfaces and serves as OCX Facilitator for DNV, supporting the Open Class 3D Exchange (OCX) Standard — a project he helped bring to life. He is the principal author of three ISO STEP Application Protocols for shipbuilding and has presented and published at ICCAS conferences for thirty years.