Surfaces of many engineering structures, specially, those of ships and airplanes are commonly fabricated as doubly curved shapes as well as singly curved surfaces to fulfill functional requirements. Given a three dimensional design surface, the first step in the fabrication process is unfolding or planar development of this surfaces into a planar shape so that the manufacturer can determine the initial shape of the flat plate. Also a good planar development enables the manufacturer to estimate the strain distribution required to form the design shape. In this paper, an algorithm for optimal approximated development of a general curved surface, including both singly and doubly curved surface is developed in the sense that the strain energy from its planar development to the design surface is minimized, subjected to some constraints. The development process is formulated into a constrained nonlinear programming problem, which is on basis of deformation theory and finite element. Constraints are subjected to characteristics of the fabrication method. Some examples on typical surfaces and the practical ship surfaces show the effectiveness of this algorithm.