NL2Hull: A Natural Language-Driven Constrained Ship Design Decision Framework

Ship structures govern vessel strength, safety, and manufacturability, but their design must satisfy hundreds of classification society requirements, making the process complex and iterative. Data-driven approaches are limited by the lack of structured datasets linking design geometry, structural performance, and rule-based constraints. This paper presents MiDShip, a multimodal dataset of 12,753 synthetic cargo-hold structural designs: 6,020 random, 496 generated by an SGLD-inspired procedure, and 6,237 generated by an equation-informed repair procedure. Each design includes parametric data, full and mesh-ready 3D geometry, engineering drawings and annotations, a bill of materials, and preliminary structural evaluations. Twenty-five constraints derived from a subset of ABS MVR are also evaluated. None of the random designs satisfies all constraints. Among the SGLD-inspired designs, 322 (64.9%) were fully compliant, with an average of 0.409 violations, 82.7% below the seed mean and 96.9% below the random-design mean. The repair procedure, developed through LLM-assisted code analysis, produced 4,952 fully compliant designs (79.4%), averaging 0.296 violations, 97.1% below the paired-source mean. In equal-size comparisons, mean nearest-neighbor distances in the scaled 120-parameter space were 3.495 for repaired designs, 1.144 for SGLD batches, and 3.729 for random designs. The primary contribution is the synchronized dataset and its generation and evaluation infrastructure; the generation studies demonstrate its utility rather than proposing new optimization algorithms. MiDShip supports machine learning, generative design, and automated rule-based evaluation for ship structures.

Accurate prediction of hydrodynamic performance is central to ship design, yet high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics remains prohibitively expensive for large-scale parametric exploration. This motivates the development of data-driven surrogate models that provide rapid approximations to hydrodynamic predictions at substantially reduced cost. We present ShipNet, a geometric deep-learning surrogate that predicts both hull-surface pressure distributions and far-field free-surface wave patterns directly from hull geometry and speed. The network employs a regularized dynamic graph convolutional backbone on hull point clouds, with a multi-head decoder for simultaneous near-body pressure and free-surface elevation outputs. Training data consist of 420 inviscid free-surface simulations generated using a potential-flow panel method for two parent yacht hulls, each parameterized into 70 variants and evaluated at three speeds. ShipNet predicts per-point pressure coefficient and two-dimensional wave elevation map using a composite loss that combines point-wise regression and image-structure terms. On a geometry-held-out test set, ShipNet achieves R^2=0.98 for hull pressure and R^2=0.91 for wave fields. Inference requires approximately 0.15s per case, yielding over a 550x speedup relative to the potential-flow solver on conventional hardware. Limitations include the restricted geometry and speed ranges and the inviscid training data, while future work will extend the model to high-fidelity viscous simulations with physics-informed regularization.

Expensive simulation-driven design is widely used in engineering to identify requirement-satisfying designs with as few high-fidelity simulations as possible. Most existing efforts address this challenge by improving optimization algorithms under fixed formulations, yet the formulation itself shapes the search landscape by defining the objectives and constraints optimized by the solver. Recent LLM-based automatic problem formulation methods generate formulations from natural-language requirements, but they mainly focus on design-intent alignment and overlook whether the formulation induces an efficient search process. To address this limitation, we propose SHA-PF, a search hardness-aware LLM-based problem formulation framework. We find that a formulation is more likely to guide efficient search when it prioritizes rare samples with greater progress potential. Based on this finding, SHA-PF defines a formulation search objective guided by search hardness, scoring each candidate formulation according to the priority. SHA-PF then searches the formulation space under this objective through LLM-based generation, repair, and evolutionary refinement. Experiments on the real-world multi-objective benchmark and five expensive antenna design benchmarks show that the formulations discovered by SHA-PF require significantly fewer evaluations to reach the design requirements than other baselines.