Hull form design is one of the most important stages for developing economical ships. Usually, hull form design is conducted by deforming manually the hull form and then the performance of the deformed form is estimated. This procedure is repeated until new forms with less fuel consumption are obtained. Recently, instead of these manual-operation based procedures, hull form optimization methods have been developed and many research works have been reported. In most of them, Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) technique is employed. However the results obtained from SQP method tend to result in the local optimization if the objective function possesses multiple peaks.

In the present paper, two hull form optimization techniques for minimizing Brake Horse Power (BHP) are compared and these efficiencies are discussed. The first one is SQP technique. The second one is Surrogate-Based Optimization (SBO) technique. By employing SBO technique, global optimum results can be obtained in shorter time. The result of VLCC hull form optimization by SQP is presented and verified by comparing with the tank test results. Then the optimum results obtained by both SBO and SQP are compared and the performances of the two techniques are discussed in terms of hull form optimization efficiency.