An approach combined Response Surface Method and Particle Swarm Optimization to ship multidisciplinary design and optimization

Ship design is a complex endeavor requiring the successful coordination of many different disciplines. According to various disciplines requirements, how to get a balanced performance is imperative in ship design. Thus, a all-in-one Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) approach is proposed to get the optimum performance of the ship considering three disciplines, structure; cargo loads and power of propulsion. In this research a Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) is employed to explore the design space and to sample data for covering the design space. For the purpose of reducing the calculation and saving the develop time, a quadratic Response Surface Method (RSM) is adopted as an approximation model for solving the system design problems. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is introduced to search the appropriate design result in MDO in ship design. Finally, the validity of the proposed approach is proven by a case study of a bulk carrier.

I. INTRODUCTION

In general, ship design is a complex system requiring the successful coordination of many different disciplines. In traditional ship design, engineer only considers the single discipline variables and factors, and then they integrate the single discipline results together to finish the whole product, which makes the design too hard to achieve a high performance level product. Multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) is a methodology for the design of systems, in which interactions between several disciplines and consideration to the design variables are analyze systematically, which directly affects more than one of the disciplines. The objective of MDO problem is to explore the design space to pursue the appropriate design parameters, values and subject to system constraints, that can improve the whole performance of the ship system [1]. MDO has presented its more superiority in the aeronautic research fields. However, to our knowledge, there is only some primary research of MDO in the ship design, because of the complexities and the traits of ship design. According to the requirements of ship design, in this paper, a MDO method combined response surface method (PSO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) is utilized to help the designers to get an optimal and appropriate design result.