Evolutionary Computation Automated Design of Ship Hull Forms for the Industry 4.0 Era

As the marine industry moves towards the industry 4.0 era, the role of automated smart design is becoming increasingly significant. This offers an ability to produce highly customisable design and to integrate with the product-lifecycle process such as digitalised ship production and ship operations to in an efficient process. Currently, the hull form optimisation process is performed manually using 'trial-and-error' approach, which is not efficient. Focusing on automated smart design, this paper introduces a hybrid evolutionary algorithm and morphing (HEAM). It works by mapping the entire hull form (phenotype) into a chromosome (genotype), which allows global shape modification using a novel 2D morphing method. By combining this 2D morphing and Genetic Algorithm (GA), it enables optimal hull designs to be produced more rapidly with no user intervention.