A Heuristic Method for Solving Ship Floating Problems Based on Improved Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

Abstract The study of ship floating balance plays a very important role in the safety of ships. According to certain conditions of ship statics, the nonlinear equations of ship balance can be established with relevant parameters such as ship weight, draft, heeling angle, longitudinal inclination angle and static moment. In this paper, motivated by the least square method, the nonlinear equations of floating equilibrium are transformed to a nonlinear programming problem. The draught, heel and trim of the ship are taken as variables, and inequality constrained by the actual situation. The penalty function for nonlinear programming is considered and minimized by particle swarm optimization. The proposed optimization method simplifies the calculation process by avoiding the calculation of parameters. Numerical results verify the efficiency of the proposed method.