Feature-based estimation of steel weight in shipbuilding

An innovative and accurate method for estimating the steel weight and center of gravity (COG) of a ship in the preliminary design phase, named feature-based segment estimation (FSE), is presented. The method is based on principal component analysis (PCA) and includes corrections to capture ship features that are neglected by PCA. The feature analysis is based on three-dimensional (3D) computer-aided design (CAD) tools, which are used to build a framework of the ship components, deriving the general steel weight formulas and developing correction methods. The method uses PCA to identify the principal parameters from a set of the ship's parameters and the main structural components, or segments, and to derive general equations for estimating the steel weight. Then, the estimated weight is adjusted using least squares regression based on the features of each structural segment. We demonstrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed method by applying 10 modern designs ranging from 1000 to 8500 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU). The estimated results are presented and compared with those of the standard method, which consists of estimating the weight of the entire ship.