The ASNE Design Sciences Series of workshops and conferences explore the emerging science of design methods, processes and tools for the successful design of naval engineering projects. Naval ships and systems are increasingly becoming cyber-physical systems as part of a broader trend commonly called the fourth industrial revolution (or Industry 4.0). The digital engineering of these cyber-physical systems cannot be executed without a digital thread enabled model based environment which goes well beyond the use of today’s design tools and methods such Computer-aided Design (CAD) and Product Model based digital repositories.