A branch and bound framework applied to naval structure optimization problems

Naval structure optimization consists of defining the optimum scantling of the constitutive elements of a structure with given general dimensions and form of the hull. Amathematical formulation leads to non linear problem with mixed (discrete continuos) variables and implicit constraints that are evaluated with a "black-box" software. The evaluation of the constraints is vry expensive in computation time. A non-linear branch and bound framework is presented to solve this problem. The method is first tested on a small example to set up the parameters of the algorithm and then is applied to a real size structures. It performs very well to provide good solutions in a reasonable time.