Considering the international competition in the domain of ship building, the European shipyards have to enhance their main assets, i.e. high performance level and quality of ships, while keeping acceptable deadlines and costs. Among the solutions which can contribute to increase the competitiveness of shipyards, the implementation, at the design level, of new technologies based on numerical tools must be considered. The parametric design approach, founded on a parametric model of the ship and on the use of existing numerical calculation tools for the design assessment, is presented here. Some examples, involving an inverse approach (automatic optimisation) are presented, and the prospects of such an approach are discussed.
