Development of Pareto strategy multi-objective function method for the optimum design of ship structures

It is necessary to develop an efficient optimization technique to perform optimum designs which have given design spaces, discrete design values and several design goals. As optimization techniques, direct search method and stochastic search method are widely used in designing of ship structures. The merit of the direct search method is to search the optimum points rapidly by considering the search direction, step size and convergence limit. And the merit of the stochastic search method is to obtain the global optimum points well by spreading points randomly entire the design spaces. In this paper, Pareto Strategy (PS) multi-objective function method is developed by considering the search direction based on Pareto optimal points, the step size, the convergence limit and the random number generation. The success points between just before and current Pareto optimal points are considered. PS method can also apply to the single objective function problems, and can consider the discrete design variables such as plate thickness, longitudinal space, web height and web space. The optimum design results are compared with existing Random Search (RS) multi-objective function method and Evolutionary Strategy (ES) multi-objective function method by performing the optimum designs of double bottom structure and double hull tanker which have discrete design values. Its superiority and effectiveness are shown by comparing the optimum results with those of RS method and ES method.