Open Collections

Inclusion of a crew safety node into the preliminary design of fishing vessels

University of British Columbia

The working and living conditions on-board of fishing vessels affect the crew's performance and well being. They contribute to occupational accidents on-board, which cost to the health and lives of crew members. There is also a cost of lost opportunity, when crew members can not perform their duties on-board and have to halt fishing due to deteriorated conditions at sea. In this thesis, a methodology that will allow the inclusion of crew comfort and safety considerations into the preliminary design of fishing vessels has been developed. This new methodology and the traditional preliminary design spired for monohull and SWATH (Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull) vessels have been implemented in Echidna, which is a logic programming environment that supports constraint based reasoning. In the literature, ship motions have been reported to be the most prominent contributory factor to the occupational accidents and crew's performance on-board. Hence, two sets of rules suitable to a knowledge-based environment and based on different engineering concepts have been developed and implemented for the preliminary design of fishing vessels to improve their seakeeping characteristics. Unlike some ship motions' calculation programs, for example SHIPMO, these rules do not require detailed hull form definition. Hence, they are used as guidelines (or heuristic rules) during the initial stages of ship design. Considering the nonlinear nature of ship design, the procedure developed was able to find a solution for a given design sea state and owner requirements. The effects of the rules on ship size, cost and improved seakeeping qualities are presented in this thesis. Additionally, monohull and SWATH vessels for the same owner requirements are compared in terms of vessel size and cost. Finally, the knowledge-based system described in this thesis provides a tool to map crew comfort levels and a design sea state to the vessel parameters. Hence the cost difference due to the crew comfort and safety considerations can be quantified. The methodology described here can easily be applied for small craft with small changes to the knowledge base. Keywords : ship design, crew safety, crew comfort, knowledge-based design, seakeeping.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-04-16

For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/7266

Mechanical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

DSpace