Interactive evolutionary computation for propeller design optimization of wind-assisted vessels

Paper in proceedings, 2020

This paper introduces a human-computer interaction methodology for a marine propeller design optimization problem. While the outcome of most optimization algorithms is a frontier with the best solutions, in blade design the engineers by taking into consideration all objectives and constraints want to focus on a part of this frontier and try to improve it and enhance it, in order to have more design alternatives. Thus there is a need for guiding the optimization to a specific direction, enabling the involvement of the designer in the design process. A proposal to achieving this goal is the use of interactive evolutionary computation, which is an optimization methodology based on genetic algorithms whereby the blade designer is called during the intermediate steps to visualize and assess specific areas of interest of the Pareto plot. The results have shown that the blade designer can steer the optimization to a specific direction and a more refined Pareto frontier is obtained. At the current stage there is a modest improvement of the design fitness, but a clear reduction in cost.