The paper is mainly concerned with the applications tn develop an optimum structural design procedure for hatchcoverless container ship. L.R rules are applied to determine the scantlings of the longitudinal members. As for an object function of midship section design, the total sectional area of all the longitudinal members for midship section is selected. The SUMT procedure combined with direct search method is applied to the solution of nonlinear optimum design problem to find a optimum midship section arrangement. The results of optimization study show that the weight of model ship may be saved about 8.0% per unit length.