Multi-criterion Scantling Optimisation of Passenger Ships

In the scantling design of a passenger ship, minimum production cost, minimum weight and maximum moment of inertia (stiffness) are conflicting objectives. For that purpose, recent improvements were made to the LBR-5 software (French acronym of “Stiffened Panels Software”, version 5.0) to optimize the scantling of ship sections by considering production cost, weight and moment of inertia in the optimisation objective function. A real multi-criterion optimisation of a passenger ship is presented in this paper. Results highlight that LBR-5 is competitive software to optimise scantling of ships at very early design stage with management of critical problems studied normally at a later step of the design.