A Study on Optimum Structural Design of Container Ship

There are many unknown variables at the initial stage of ship design. Since the computational time of finite element analysis including modeling is large, it is not appropriate to use finite element method at this stage of ship design. In this paper, structural analysis by transfer matrix method for longitudinal and transverse strength is implemented for container ship design. Genetic algorithm is used for an optimization method, since discrete design variables can be handled easily. The method also has advantage that globally optimized solution can be obtained. The objective function of cost minimization is considered, and its result is compared with real ship.