Ship Design with a Morphing Evolutionary Algorithm

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.