Nearly 71% of Earth's surface area is occupied by the ocean, which is abundant in energy, with wave energy being one of its essential components. As a result, the investigation of wave energy generation devices is a crucial matter. This paper analyzes the performance of the oscillating water column (OWC) wave energy conversion device under the influence of unidirectional regular waves and optimizes the OWC device accordingly. The impact of different structural dimensions on the first-stage conversion efficiency of the OWC device is determined. Moreover, to evaluate the performance of the OWC device in real sea conditions, the wave climate at Sanmen Gorge is employed as the experimental parameter. The study examines the performance and characteristic response of the OWC device regarding the air chamber width, thickness of the front wall, and draught of the front wall. The findings reveal that the width of the OWC air chamber and the draught of the front wall significantly affect the OWC performance. Decreasing the width of the air chamber results in a stable horizontal plane, eliminating the occurrence of standing wave phenomena. As the draft of the front wall increases, the reflection coefficient of the air chamber gradually increases, and it becomes difficult for the wave to penetrate into the air chamber section. The Latin hypercube design experiment method was used to select experimental points and establish quadratic polynomial response functions. The OWC device was optimized based on multi-island genetic algorithm. The simulation and fault tolerant optimization methods presented in this paper can be widely used to improve system performance.