Objectives   For the hull line optimization design of luxury cruise ships, except for its aesthetic needs, it is of utmost important for the design and optimization of the hull form to be able to acquire resistance performance throughout the whole sailing period at variable speeds. This is in line with today's requirements of energy saving, safety and comfort features.

  Methods  Based on the in-house hull form optimization design software OPTShip-SJTU, a luxury cruise ship is regarded as the initial hull to reduce its wave-making resistance at variable speeds. The hull form deformation is then implemented by the free-form deformation (FFD) method and the resistance evaluation is carried out by the Neumann-Michell (NM) potential-flow-based solver NMShip-SJTU to obtain the optimal hulls using optimization algorithms. Finally, the optimal hulls set at two specified speeds are then chosen for further analysis using the viscous-flow-based solver naoe-FOAM-SJTU in order to verify that the optimal hulls do have better total resistance performances at the two specified speeds.

  Results  Results show that using NMShip-SJTU solver to do the optimization is more efficient and the two optimal hulls having a 0.65% and 0.98% total drag reduction respectively.

  Conclusions  The research indicates that the simulation-based hull form optimization process can be applied in the optimization of resistance and even comprehensive performances for the luxury cruise ships.