Abstract
In the view of the importance of material reduction due to the jump in oil and steel prices, an optimized structural system for lifting lugs was developed. Such a system is needed hundreds of thousands of times a year. A direct design process was added to this developed optimized system to increase the design efficiency and provide a way of directly inserting a designer's decisions into the design system process. In order to verify the system efficiency and convenience, several new prototype lug shapes were suggested using the developed system. From these research results, it was found that the slope of the main plate of the lug structure has a tendency to move from about 45 degrees to about 60 degrees and the design weight was reduced from an initial value of about 32kgf to about $15{\sim}19kg_f$ after the redesign. Based on these initial research results, an efficient reduction in steel weight was expected considering the enormous consumption of lug structures per year. Additionally, a more detail structural analysis through local strength evaluations will be performed to verify the efficiency of the optimum structural design for a lug structure.