Application of a surrogate modeling to the ship structural design

• Overview of surrogate modeling and three widely used surrogate modeling methods.
• Description of object oriented programming implementation of surrogate modeling.
• Introduction of method for ship structure optimization with surrogates.
• Comparison of surrogate modeling methods accuracy for structural responses.
• Comparison of two presented ship structure optimization approaches.

Multi-criteria design of complex engineering systems is methodologically and computationally demanding and time consuming process. Optimization algorithms, problem decomposition, surrogate modeling and methods for decision support are synthesis methods that are usually employed to solve the design problem. The objective of the research presented in this paper was to improve the design process of complex thin-walled ship structures through an application of surrogate modeling on this type of a problem. Methods considered are integrated into interactive computing environment for multi-criteria design in order to enable effective and efficient interaction between designer and design problem within given design timeframe. Surrogate modeling was applied for the approximation of structural responses in order to reduce a number of finite element method (FEM) calculations inside of optimization loop. Applicability of the proposed approach and suitability of different surrogate modeling methods for that purpose is extensively tested on the simple barge example.