While conventional design and manufacturing techniques of fiber-reinforced laminates keep the fiber orientation angle constant within a layer, automated tow-placement technology allows fabricating laminates with curved fibers. This offers more flexibility to tailor the mechanical properties and improve the performance of laminated structures. Exploiting this flexibility requires an efficient method for finding optimal or near-optimal fiber configurations. In this paper, laminated cylindrical shells are studied. Curvilinear variations for the fiber orientations are adopted in the circumferential and longitudinal directions. The computational burden, typical in numerical optimization of complex structures, is reduced using a Kriging model, which substitutes for direct finite element simulation. A sequential quadratic programming algorithm is employed as local optimizer, coupled with a restart strategy to search for the global optimum in the entire design space. Some numerical cases are presented: the maximization of the fundamental frequency of the shell considering different boundary conditions and the minimization of the maximum displacement with a constraint on the buckling load.
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