Since task allocation is one of the core tasks of ship design, the choice of its allocation strategy is a key factor that affects whether the task and the design agent can be beneficially matched. Different from the traditional one-way assignment mode of assigning tasks to designers, in the task assignment strategy of modern ship collaborative design mode, designers’ ability and benefit ratio is getting higher and higher. Therefore, in order to improve the efficiency and quality of task design, this paper proposes a multidesign agent-task allocation decision-making method. In this paper, the task attributes and designers’ attributes are introduced into the task allocation strategy model, and the fuzzy linguistic variable method is used to build the evaluation index matrix of the design agent, and the task timeliness function is established. Secondly, the multidesign agent-task benefit function is established and solved to obtain the best allocation strategy. Finally, through example verification and comparative analysis with the Round-Robin algorithm (RR) and the Weighted Round-Robin (WRR) algorithm, the validity, feasibility, and stability of the multidesign agent-task allocation decision-making method proposed in this paper are verified, and it is proved that the task allocation method takes the bilateral needs of the task and the design agent into account, solves the optimal allocation strategy of collaborative design tasks, and realizes the balanced allocation between the ship collaborative design task and the design agent.

Neural network models, such as BP, LSTM, etc., support only numerical inputs, so data preprocessing needs to be carried out on the categorical variables to convert them into numerical data. For unordered multi-categorical variables, existing encoding methods may produce dimensional catastrophes and may also introduce additional order misrepresentation and distance bias in neural network computation. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes an unordered multi-categorical variable encoding method O-AE using orthogonal matrix for encoding and encoding representation learning and dimensionality reduction via an autoencoder. Bayesian optimization is used for hyperparameter optimization of the autoencoder. Finally, seven experiments were designed with the basic O-AE, Bayesian optimization of the hyperparameters of the autoencoder for O-AE, and other encoding methods to encode unordered multi-categorical variables in five datasets, and they were input into a BP neural network to carry out target prediction experiments. The results show that the experiments using O-AE and O-AE-b have better prediction results, proving that the method proposed in this paper is highly feasible and applicable and can be an optional method for the data processing of unordered multi-categorical variables.

Aiming to address the frequent design conflicts arising during multi-disciplinary collaboration in the detailed design phase of large cruise ships, coupled with the inadequacy of traditional methods in detecting unknown constraints, this paper proposes a hybrid conflict detection framework integrating interval propagation with intelligent algorithms. First, using the piping design of a cruise ship’s water supply system as a typical scenario, design constraints are categorized into known and unknown sets. For known constraints, the interval propagation algorithm is employed for rapid inference and verification. For unknown constraints that are difficult to express explicitly, an improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) algorithm is proposed to optimize the parameters of a radial basis function (RBF) neural network, thereby constructing an IPSO-RBF conflict detection model. Case studies demonstrate the interval propagation algorithm’s efficacy in identifying conflicts within water supply pipeline designs. Concurrently, testing against historical design datasets reveals that the IPSO-RBF model outperforms multiple comparative models, including PSO-RBF, AFSA-RBF, etc., in terms of conflict detection accuracy, precision, and recall. This validates the method’s effectiveness and superiority in resolving design conflicts within complex systems for large cruise ships.