Parametric structural analysis for a platform supply vessel at conceptual design phase – a sensitivity study via design of experiments

Current State of Development of Ship Structural Design and Optimization Methods

“…establish functional relationship. In [3] this relationship was established between a number of design variables and design objective directly. This example will be analysed in detail in Chapter 3.…”

“…This study is presented in [3] and all the data given in this subchapter are from the same paper. The aim of the study is the structural design with optimisation of a platform supply vessel.…”

“…Among all the descriptors, it is important to select the most important ones ("Selection of vital design descriptors" step) because this leads to significant savings in time and computation, e.g. the number of experiments needed for training of a surrogate model (n e in Figure 5) increases by the square of design variables [3]. This selection can be based on designer's experience, analysis of similar ships (statistics) or relevant studies (as is the case in this analysis -for more information see [3]).…”

“…Basically, if a relationship between the objectives is established (e.g. desirability of one objective over the other), then only one objective function can be obtained that combines the objectives as given by the desirability coefficients (see more in [3]).…”

“…Thus, in the next chapter we give a brief overview of the theory behind those elements of the rationally-based design that a reader, not primarily involved in design methods, is less familiarised with, namely design support system (DeSS), surrogate modelling, sensitivity analysis and structural optimisation. In Chapter 3 a case study from the offshore industry demonstrates the application of these elements in the structural design of a platform support vessel [3]. At the end, we sum up with a discussion on the main benefits of the abovementioned methodology as well as some challenges that a structural designer might encounter if he decides to use it.…”