Abstract
Generally in order to reduce the steel weight of stiffened plate, stiffener spaces tend to be narrow and the plate gets thin. However, it will involve more fabrication cost because it can lead to the increase of welding length and the number of structural members. In the yard, the design which is able to reduce the total fabrication cost is needed, although it requires more steel weight. The purpose of this study is to find optimum stiffener spaces to minimize the fabrication cost for the cargo tank of LPG Carriers. Global optimization methods such as ES(Evolution Strategy) and GA(Genetic Algorithm) are introduced to find a global optimum solution and the sum of steel material cost and labor cost is selected as main objective function. Convergence degree of both methods in according to the size of searching population is examined and an efficient size is investigated. In order to verify the necessity of the optimum design based on the cost, minimum weight design and minimum cost design are carried out.