Abstract: With the vigorous development of artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering, as an engineering technology discipline that studies the intelligent processing of knowledge, has gradually become a research hotspot, and the ship design method based on knowledge engineering has also received increasing attention. This article systematically summarizes and analyzes the application and development of knowledge engineering in the field of ship design from three aspects: overall conceptual ship design, hull structure design, and ship layout design, and also elaborately introduces two typical cases of the application of knowledge engineering in ship hull form design and shipyard-institute collaborative design. Meanwhile, it summarizes and refines the main problems and constraints in the application of knowledge engineering, and looks forward to the promotion of knowledge engineering development by large language model (LLM) technology. Through knowledge engineering technology, ship design can be intelligentized, relevant specifications and requirements can be quickly invoked, and the existing ship design knowledge that has been fully proven through practice can be stored and derived, improving design efficiency and shortening the cycle. However, it still faces many challenges and needs further exploration and improvement.