Spreadsheet modeling to determine optimum ship main dimensions and power requirements at basic design stage

The objective of this paper is to describe and evaluate a scheme of engineering-economic analysis in determine optimum ship main dimensions and power requirements at the basic design stage. An optimization model designs the problem and is arranged into five main parts, namely, Input, Equation, Constraint, Output and Objective Function. The constraints, which are the considerations to be fulfilled, become the director of this process and a minimum and a maximum value are set on each constraint so as to give the working area of the optimization process. The outputs (decision variables) are optimized in favor of minimizing the objective function. Microsoft Excel-Premium Solver Platform (PSP), a spreadsheet modeling tool is utilized to model the optimization problem. The first part of this paper contains a description on general optimization problems, followed by model construction of the optimization program. A case study on the determination of ship main dimensions and its power requirements for a tanker is introduced with the main objective being to minimize the economic cost of transport (ECT). After simulating the model and verifying the results, it is observed that this method yields considerably comparable results with the main dimensions and power requirement database of the real operated ships (tanker). It is also believed that this process needs no painful and exhaustive efforts to produce the programming code, if the problem and optimization model have been well defined.