Multi-objective optimisation as an early design tool for smart ship internal arrangement

Modern optimisation methodologies have revolutionised the engineering sector and pave the way for innovation. In ship design this has been spearheaded by the introduction of the Holistic Design approach that allows more and more of attributes and performances of the end product to be assessed accurately and concurrently even at the early design phase. This for the first time empowers the designers and decision makers to precisely capture the design space, mapping even the uncertainty embedded in the utilised methods and create robust variants in a multi-objective environment.
Though a truly automated design is still far in the future many important aspects of it are slowly delegated to optimization routines. In this respect, the authors present herein propose a methodology based on the optimisation of the functionalities that the general arrangement needs to provide (in this case adjacency, noise and evacuation flow). The methodology allows for a large optimization space, several objectives and intrinsic control by the user at all the stages to shape the balance between the multiple objectives. By re-arranging the location of the spaces onboard; in relation to their position on the hull as well as their relation between themselves, significant improvements can be achieved especially at an early design stage. The approach outlines how more functional objectives can be incorporated through modularity and penalty functions, keeping the overall process simple and flexible to adapt to fluid early design requirements.