Search

Advancements in digitalisation and cyber-physical automation are opening up new frontiers in the marine industry such as autonomous shipping and smart manufacturing of ships. However, the progress in automating the ship design process which is still very human dependent, is slow. This paper introduces an automated ship design and optimisation concept by Hybridising Evolutionary Algorithm and Morphing (HEAM) to enable a more intelligent and efficient ship design process. It maps the entire ship hull form into a genotype using Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) and flexible modification through morphing to create efficient designs for the hull form. This new method achieves predictive designs with a performance improvement of 11.67%, while achieving increased efficiency and minimum user dependency.

As the marine industry moves towards the industry 4.0 era, the role of automated smart design is becoming increasingly significant. This offers an ability to produce highly customisable design and to integrate with the product-lifecycle process such as digitalised ship production and ship operations to in an efficient process. Currently, the hull form optimisation process is performed manually using ‘trial-and-error’ approach, which is not efficient. Focusing on automated smart design, this paper introduces a hybrid evolutionary algorithm and morphing (HEAM). It works by mapping the entire hull form (phenotype) into a chromosome (genotype), which allows global shape modification using a novel 2D morphing method. By combining this 2D morphing and Genetic Algorithm (GA), it enables optimal hull designs to be produced more rapidly with no user intervention.