Ship dimensioning in the initial design

In this work it is presented a generic procedure for the determination of the main characteristics of a merchant ship at the initial design stage. In this process, first it is developed a model that takes into consideration some of its specific aspects of the ship such as the configuration of the cargo area, technical and physical constraints and the typical voyage. Next, the main dimensions and characteristics of the ship are determined by optimizing a selected technical/economic measure of merit using a non-linear optimisation algorithm. The proposed procedure was implemented as a spreadsheet based application. The system architecture designed to speed-up the development of the ship model, constraints and objectives is presented.