Containership structural design and optimization based on knowledge-based engineering and Gaussian process

Knowledge-based engineering (KBE) has made success in automobile and molding design industry, and it is introduced into the ship structural design in this paper. From the implementation of KBE, the deterministic design solutions for both rules design method (RDM) and interpolation design method (IDM) are generated. The corresponding finite element model is generated. Gaussian process (GP) is then employed to build the surrogate model for finite element analysis, in order to increase efficiency and maintain accuracy at the same time, and the multi-modal adaptive importance sampling method is adopted to calculate the corresponding structural reliability. An example is given to validate the proposed method. Finally, the reliabilities of the structures’ strength caused by uncertainty lying in water corrosion, static and wave moments are calculated, and the ship structures are optimized to resist the water corrosion by multi-island genetic algorithm. Deterministic design results from the RDM and IDM are compared with each separate robust design result. The proposed method shows great efficiency and accuracy.