| Summary: | 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. === Applied Science, Faculty of === Mechanical Engineering, Department of === Graduate
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