Automated structural optimisation of ships' midship section in concept design phase

This paper concerns structural optimisation of ships' midship section in concept design phase. The main focus of the present research is to demonstrate an automated optimisation process for a typical midship section of RoPax vessel, which has been developing within the framework of EU-project HOLISHIP (2016-2020). In this purpose, a number of existing tools along with their new script/batch-mode developments (namely MARS2000 (R) as a tool from Bureau Veritas for structural strength assessment and modeFRONTIER (R) as optimiser tool) as well as some new in-house tools/modules developments (e.g. Scantling-Spacing Updater, Rule Violation Indicator, ...) have been integrated under an automated iterative routine. In the automated optimisation loop, structural weight is taken as objective function to be minimized, and plate thickness, stiffener spacing and stiffener sizing are considered as design variables. Based on that, the obtained optimisation results are presented.