Design customisation and optimisation through effective design space exploration

Virtually any new building is a variation of some baseline design customised for new requirements. Should such requirements imply significant deviations from the baseline, the design team faces with a great challenge to deliver on time. Design complexity and associated uncertainties as well as tight delivery deadlines are the causes for the struggle. Therefore a solution to this practical difficulty has been of exceptional interest to both industry and academia. The purpose of this paper is to propose exactly this solution, aiming at ship design customisation and optimisation problem. The approach is based on utilisation of a technically and scientifically sound methodology that is implemented in a software platform. The key feature of the methodology is the ability to evaluate thousands of design alternatives in a matter of a few hours, while searching for a design (or a set of them) that satisfies imposed requirements and optimises design objectives. This specifically achieved through utilisation of the response surface methodology for approximation of complex phenomena such as intact and damage ship stability as well as other performance metrics. The approach, as a design and decision support tool, is supposed to be used in conceptual design stage to quickly (within a few hours) arrive at design alternatives that both satisfy requirements (owner and regulatory) and have maximised commercial performance. The latter is referred to as improvement of design marketability. The application of the approach is specifically demonstrated in three case studies, i.e. example design customisation problems