a b s t r a c tA general procedure is developed for stability of stiffened conical shells. It is used for studying the sensitivity behavior with respect to the stiffener configurations. The effect of the pre-buckling nonlinearity on the bifurcation point, as well as the limit-point load level, is examined. The unique algorithm presented by the authors is an extended version of an earlier one, adapted for determination of the limit-point load level of imperfect conical shells. The eigenvalue problem is iteratively solved with respect to the nonlinear equilibrium state up to the bifurcation point or to the limit-point load level.A general symbolic code (using MAPLE) was programmed to create the differential operators based on Donnell's type shell theory. Then the code uses the Galerkin procedure, the Newton-Raphson procedure, and a finite difference scheme for automatic development of an efficient FORTRAN code which is used for the parametric study.