From the engineering point of view, a synthesis as well as an analysis technique is explored to search for the improved design of grillage which is common in ship structure. As an approximate analysis method for the grillage, an interaction reaction method is developed and compared with the finite element method. It is found that the discrepancy between these two methods is so negligible that the percent method could be used effectively for the grillage analysis. As an optimization technique, a feasible direction method could be used is combined with the intersection reaction method in order to design a minimum weight optimal grillage. The feasible direction method shows a good numerical performance although it requires more calculation times compared with the direct search method. Finally, the application of multiple objective optimization method to grillage is investigated in order to resolve conflicts existed between the multiple objectives which is a common characteristic of structure design problem. Goal programming method is extended to handle a nonlinear property of constraints and objective functions. It seems that the nonlinear goal programming could help not only to establish a relative importance of each objective, but also enable the designer to choose the best combination of design variables.