An artificial intelligence-aided design (AIAD) of ship hull structures

Ship-hull design is a complex process because the any slight local alteration in ship hull structure may significantly change the hydrostatic and hydrodynamic performances of a ship. To find the optimum hull shape under the design requirements, the state-of-art of ship hull design combines computational fluid dynamics computation with geometric modeling. However, this process is very computationally intensive, which is only suitable at the final stage of the design process. To narrow down the design parameter space, in this work, we have developed an AI-based deep learning neural network to realize a real-time prediction of the total resistance of the ship-hull structure in its initial design process. In this work, we have demonstrated how to use the developed DNN model to carry out the initial ship hull design. The validation results showed that the deep learning model could accurately predict the ship hull’s total resistance accurately after being trained, where the average error of all samples in the testing dataset is lower than 4%. Simultaneously, the trained deep learning model can predict the hip’s performances in real-time by inputting geometric modification parameters without tedious preprocessing and calculation processes. The machine learning approach in ship hull design proposed in this work is the first step towards the artificial intelligence-aided design in naval architectures.