Artificial Intelligence and Marine Design

grown in exploring AI approaches to design problems, both because of the enormous potential impact on productivity of improved design tools and because of the interesting basic AI issues that these problems raise. In particular, a number of ship designers and AI researchers recently became interested in applying AI to the hydrodynamic design of ship hulls. A typical problem here is to design the shape of a ship’s hull in response to desired hydrodynamic properties such as drag and stability, taking into consideration a variety of design constraints, such as total hull volume. This problem differs in a number of ways from most previous work in AI and design. For instance, unlike circuit or program design, hull design involves designing a shape rather than a structure of discrete primitives. Furthermore, the underlying domain theory that permits a designer to reason about relationships between candidate designs and their physical (hydrodynamic) properties is extremely complex, so complex that the choice of appropriate simplifications and approximations is essential to make computations tractable. Because of these differences, hydrodynamic design has the potential to test and stretch our current ideas about how to do design.