Abstract: Ship structures are conventionally connected by typical triangular brackets, which could cause stress concentration at the connections between ship structures and the bracket. In this paper, a new design method of brackets is proposed, where sub-modeling technologies are employed to conduct the refinement stress analysis of the brackets, while the topology optimization is applied to improve the stress concentration. In this study, the material distribution of the bracket is chosen as the design variable, and the stress of the girder close to the bracket is considered as the constraints, while the stress of the connections between the bracket and the girders is considered as the objective. A new type of bracket structure is proposed once the proper engineering treatment is applied to the topology optimization results of the bracket. The optimized bracket's stress concentration is seen to improve greatly. In brief, the presented method may provide reference for the strength analysis and optimum design of similar structures.