An Artificial Neural Network-Based Method for Prediction of Ice Resistance of Polar Ships

Abstract

Accurate prediction of ice resistance plays an important role in ensuring the safety of ship sailing in polar navigation in ice areas. In recent years, machine learning has been widely used in the field of ships, among which artificial neural network (ANN) is a common method. The focus of this paper is to design an ANN model for predicting the ice resistance of polar ships. According to the traditional empirical and semi-empirical formula, appropriate input characteristic parameters are selected. The radial basis function (RBF) neural network model is built based on a large number of ship model test data, and the genetic algorithm (GA) is used to optimize the model. The research shows that the radial basis function neural network model optimized by genetic algorithm (RBF-GA) based on seven characteristic parameters input has good generalization effect. Compared with the model test and full-scale test data, the average error is about 8%, which shows that the RBF-GA model has a high accuracy, and can be used as a tool for ice resistance prediction.

Keywords

• ice resistance
• machine learning
• radial basis function (rbf) neural network
• genetic algorithm (ga)
• ship test