The paper considers the problem of engineering systems design in modern shipbuilding, which is based on using the computer-aided design systems. In today’s environment, not all engineering calculations can be implemented in the form of an algorithm for a specific design procedure. One of these calculations is determining the resonant frequency of transverse vibrations of a ship shaft line. Analyzing the parameters of such a dynamic system is a serious task even at the stage of preliminary design. The urgent task in the design and strength calculations of the shaft line is to calculate the hydrodynamic bending moments resulting from the operation of the propeller in an uneven velocity field. There has been presented a software implementation of the semi-empirical methodology for determining the hydrodynamic bending moments acting on ship shaft lines. The main principles of the methodology, the initial data on the vessel hull, and the quantities characterizing the operating mode of the propeller are described. There is proposed a sequence and software implementation of the method for determining hydrodynamic bending moments in the environment of Maple computer algebra. The problem of representing empirical data in the form of bilinear interpolation and interpolation polynomial is solved. The results of a numerical experiment to determine the constant and amplitude values of the hydrodynamic bending moments for shaft shafts of full-scale vessels are presented. The software implementation of the technique proposed made it possible to automate the process of determining external forces in the calculations of the cyclic strength of the propeller shaft at the early stages of the design of the vessel. The research results are in addition to existing automation tools.