Variant designing in the preliminary small ship design process

Ship designing is a complex process, as the ship itself is a complex, technical multi-level object which operates in the air/water boundary environment and is exposed to the action of many different external and internal factors resulting from the adopted technical solutions, type of operation, and environmental conditions. A traditional ship design process consists of a series of subsequent multistage iterations, which gradually increase the design identification level. The paper presents problems related to the design of a small untypical vessel with the aid of variant methodology making use of optimisation algorithms. The computer-aided design methodology has been developed which does not need permanent reference to already built real ships and empirical-statistical relations. Possibilities were indicated for integrating together early design stages, and parallel designing of hull shape and parameters.