Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering

This paper proposes a tool to estimate crew composition based on safety/operational and financial requirements. As there is a tendency of ship owners to implement improved technologies on board their vessels, there is no systematic way to predict their potential effect on crew size and composition (typically determined by flag state authorities on a case-to-case basis) nor on the type and complexity of on board duties new technologies might dictate. The main aim of this paper is to develop a tool to assist in determining crew composition, by taking into account both administration's and the ship owner's point of view. Based on data collected from ship owners, a data mining technique is implemented in order to form a generalized framework that estimates crew composition as a function of ship type, size, and degree of automation. The agreement of model predictions with records from specific (vessel) cases is very good in terms of safety (for operations such as watchkeeping, mooring/unmooring, loading/unloading). The specific intended use of this tool is to help a ship owner decide whether it is cost-beneficial to retrofit a conventional vessel with advanced technologies that would potentially entail a reduced crew (probably dealing with different and more complex on board duties). Its main benefits are that it can be used to estimate crew composition before any vessel construction or upgrade has actually taken place and that it allows crew composition to be easily adapted to the technological evolution of ship systems even at their current rapid pace.

In this paper, we present the development of a tree analysis approach for the strategic level of handling and confronting oil pollution incidents-matters. We describe its basic structure (levels of factors) and the way it can formulate the local oil pollution. The paper is concluded with the presentation of an indicative example.

A detailed cost-benefit analysis of a retrofit of the Advanced Technology to Optimise Maritime Operational Safety (ATOMOS) platform on board icebreaker Frej is presented. After accurately determining the relationship between the costs and benefits, an analysis is implemented in order to assess the most basic advantages and disadvantages of the suggested retrofitting action in monetary terms. A two-step approach is adopted. The first step is to define the major categories of the ship operational aggregate costs and benefits (for example, the actual cost of the ATOMOS platform and of equipment not part of the ATOMOS platform but still necessary for its installation and operation, or the expected crew decrease because of the higher degree of automation). The second step is to examine the various basic components of these categories (for example, administration and training cost, required automatic radar plotting aid [ARPA] and electronic chart display and information system [ECDIS) equipment acquisition cost, fuel benefits, and insurance benefits). The cost-benefit analysis performed is followed by a sensitivity analysis of the most important factors affecting the net present value of the investment. It is shown that it takes about 5 years for the ATOMOS retrofit to be fully paid back by the annual savings it offers and it takes about 6.5 years for the net present value of the investment to turn positive. This coupled by the increased vessel safety justifies the decision to :etrofit Frej with the ATOMOS platform. Furthermore, it is found that the cost of the ATOMOS platform, the benefits from crew decrease, and the interest rate are those factors that essentially determine the profitability of the investment. In the case of Frej, it is concluded that the retrofit is worth undertaking for the majority of future scenarios.