The Application Of The Particle Swarm Optimization On The Engine Room Arrangement

Ship general arrangement design is an important part of ship design, which has direct influences on the efficiency of ship use, navigation performance, safety and structural strength. Engine room is the 'heart' of a ship, which not only affects the safe navigation, but also affects the ship's load, speed, and greatly affects environment as well. Since the location of the engine room affects the superstructure form, arrangement of watertight compartments, and the layout, even the shipping efficiency and techno-economic performance, it is an important issue of the general layout in the ship design. Regarding to cabin layout, the designers must consider how to arrange equipments in a limited cabin space, in order to satisfy the structure and performance requirements, it is an arrangement issue with performance constraints. This is a design process of repeat and spiral progress. Traditional methods need to repeat the design procedures of design and refinement, which makes the ship compartment layout design tedious, time consuming and inefficient. Engine arrangement is also a kind of cabin layout design, but it involves more equipments, more complicated relationships of positions. The design efficiency of engine room arrangement has been remaining extremely low due to its complexity of arrangement and more contents to be considered. At present, the relative research is understudied, in order to shorten the design cycle, improve design efficiency and quality, and reduce design time and required cost, people have started to seek and explore new design theory, methods and tools. From the viewpoint of layout design, taking engine room layout design as study object, and referred to the research results of the layout optimization and the cabin layout optimization, this paper applies the particle swarm optimization algorithm and theory to achieve the optimal layout design of the engine room.First, according to the principles of particle swarm optimization, the characteristics of the algorithm are analyzed and improved, and a test function is used to verify this optimization algorithm; Second, expression and inferential method are proposed by analyzing the equipment type in the engine room and general arrangement principles, and in turn 3D solid modeling is realized in CATIA; Taking into account the principle of layout design, mathematics model for the layout optimization is established, the relationship of space constraints for the equipment is also analyzed to derive the mathematics expression of the space constraints, and then solve the geometric constraints with numerical algorithm. Lastly applied the particle swarm optimization into the engine room arrangement optimization, the validity and effectiveness are proved with example.