| Summary: | Concept design is the initial stage of the ship design process during which design alternatives are developed to study their cost and performance trade-offs. Traditional design approaches are capable of exploring only a small region of the design space around a chosen parent. Alternative approaches have not received widespread acceptance because of their "black-box" nature, whereby they try to provide prescriptive solutions rather than assist the designer in comparing available design alternatives. This thesis proposes a new design approach that avoids these drawbacks. Central to the proposed design approach is a multi-objective optimisation tool using genetic algorithms, capable of generating the Tareto-front' consisting of designs optimised to a set of objectives. The novelty in the proposed design approach lies in the analysis of the Pareto-front, which helps to provide design insights about the whole Pareto-front and about the individual designs. This thesis describes and illustrates the proposed design approach with example ship designs. To demonstrate the approach, it is used to re-design three naval combatants that were originally designed using a traditional design approach. These applications illustrate how the analysis of the Pareto-front can potentially assist in the concept design process. For example, it may reveal interesting regions of the performance space, such as discontinuities. Multiple Pareto-fronts with varying constraints or design inputs may identify designs not traditionally examined. Such results may help the designer to have a more informed dialogue with the customer about the design requirements and the potential solutions. It is hoped that the transparent and interactive nature of the proposed design approach will make it useful to practising designers and thus improve the applicability of multi-objective optimisation during preliminary ship design. This may improve the quality of the ships designed, albeit within the limited objectives considered for optimisation, and reduce the total time taken for concept design.
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