Journal Article

Designing Ship Hull Forms Using Generative Adversarial Networks

Yonekura, Kazuo, Omori, Kotaro, Qi, Xinran, Suzuki, Katsuyuki

2025

Overview

We proposed a GAN-based method to generate a ship hull form. Unlike mathematical hull forms that require geometrical parameters to generate ship hull forms, the proposed method requires desirable ship performance parameters, i.e., the drag coefficient and tonnage. The objective of this study is to demonstrate the feasibility of generating hull geometries directly from performance specifications, without relying on explicit geometrical inputs. To achieve this, we implemented a conditional Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty (cWGAN-GP) framework. The generator learns to synthesize hull geometries conditioned on target performance values, while the discriminator is trained to distinguish real hull forms from generated ones. The GAN model was trained using a ship hull form dataset generated using the generalized Wigley hull form. The proposed method was evaluated through numerical experiments and successfully generated ship data with small errors: less than 0.08 in mean average percentage error.

• Publisher: MDPI AG
• Subject: Business metrics / Design / Drag coefficients / Energy consumption / Energy efficiency / GAN / Generative adversarial networks / Machine learning / Neural networks / Numerical analysis / Optimization / Parameters / ship hull form / Ship hulls