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Abstract Environmental sustainability, as well as social and economic well-being, must be considered in every stage of a product lifecycle, from conceptual design to its retirement. Even though this sustainability-centric approach represents a critical driver for innovation, it also increases the design complexity. Nowadays, the maritime transport accounts for a large share of transport demand, and the importance of sustainable ship design is increasingly growing, not only for ethical and legislative but also for competitive reasons. The design of a sustainable ship considering all those aspects is a complex process in this regard. One way to manage the complexity is to identify and avoid the functional couplings at the early stage of the design process. This paper presents the conceptual design of a merchant ship's conventional propulsion system with a view to the Axiomatic Design framework and known sustainable engineering principles. We also explore the Bayesian machine learning interface to propose a data-driven method for calculating the probability of achieving specific sustainability-related functional requirements. Data-driven Bayesian reasoning can also be used to select the best design parameter among the proposed alternatives as well as to identify hidden design couplings that have not identified by the designers in the conceptual design stage.