Thin-walled shell structures such as those used for space launch vehicles have been the subject of research for many decades. Due to the currently increasing competition on the space launch vehicle market, decreasing the costs per launch is brought to the fore. Designing imperfection sensitive shell structures is challenging as the imperfections that drastically reduce the load-carrying capacity of these structures are unknown at the beginning of the design procedure. However, within this thesis it is shown that if the manufacturing signature, which is the relation between the manufacturing process and the imperfection pattern, is known at the beginning of the design procedure, it is possible to predict the load-carrying capacity of the investigated structures. Therefore, a coupled structural and economical design procedure that can be used to design shell structures that are optimized regarding their structural mass and manufacturing costs is developed. Furthermore, the measurement system SIMS is developed and used in order to measure the geometric and thickness imperfections of cylindrical structures. The measurement results are used in order to study the imperfection sensitivity and to derive the manufacturing signature of isotropic flow-formed shell structures.weiterlesen