Prediction of seakeeping in the early stage of conventional monohull vessels design using artificial neural network

Abstract

Nowadays seakeeping is mostly analyzed by means of model testing or numerical models. Both require a significant amount of time and the exact hull geometry, and therefore seakeeping is not taken into account at the early stages of ship design. Hence the main objective of this work is the development of a seakeeping prediction tool to be used in the early stages of ship design.

This tool must be fast, accurate, and not require the exact hull shape. To this end, an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm has been developed. This algorithm is based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and only requires a number of ship coefficients of form.

The methodology developed to obtain the predictive algorithm is presented as well as the database of ships used for training the ANN. The data were generated using a frequency domain seakeeping code based on the boundary element method (BEM). Also, the AI predictions are compared to the BEM results using both, ship hulls included and not included in the database.

As a result of this work it has been obtained an AI tool for seakeeping prediction of conventional monohull vessels