An Approach to Knowledge Acquisition for the Hull Form Design of Fishing Crafts

Abstract

A knowledge based design system for fishing vessels consisting of a consultation component, a generic database/representation program and statistics based tools for analysis was developed. An overview of the system is discussed in this paper with the database system and procedure described in detail. The database generation system consisted of an on-screen digitizing program requiring scanned images of two dimensional lines. The digitized hull was stored in a database as an instance consisting of a class defined in an object oriented system. Upright hydrostatic calculation were also included and used for checking the scaling error of the system. The program was developed to build up knowledge about existing hull forms and when the database is of sufficient size, statistical tools and techniques as well as other useful, relevant tools will be applied to derive knowledge on hull design.