Practical Application of Early Stage Ship Configuration Optimization: Deep water Drillship Design

摘要

The recently developed 3D packing routine for the early stage configuration design of ships (van Oers et al, 2010) has the potential to enable a more thorough consideration of a large number of alternative designs early in the design process. This paper presents the results of the very first application of this packing approach in a test case on the design of deepwater drilling vessels, in order to evaluate its practical capabilities. The results illustrate that a large and diverse set of compact and coherent drilling vessel configurations can indeed be obtained on the basis of one single input model, demonstrating its capability to generate a large number of alternative designs. The paper furthermore reflects on how a two-step approach, in which a designer first generates a large amount of configuration alternatives and consequently evaluates and select solutions, can flexibly be applied, demonstrating its utility in the early stage design of deepwater drilling vessels.