Advanced Ship Systems Condition Monitoring for Enhanced Inspection, Maintenance and Decision Making in Ship Operations

Structural and machinery failures in the day-to-day ship operations may lead to major accidents, endangering crew and passengers onboard, posing a threat to the environment, damaging the ship itself and having a great impact in terms of business losses. In this respect, this paper presents the INCASS (Inspection Capabilities for Enhanced Ship Safety) project which aims bringing an innovative solution to the ship inspection regime through the introduction of enhanced inspection of ship structures, by integrating robotic-automated platforms for on-line or on-demand ship inspection activities and selecting the software and hardware tools that can implement or facilitate specific inspection tasks, to provide input to the Decision Support System (DSS). Enhanced inspection of ships will also include ship structures and machinery monitoring with real time information using ‘intelligent’ sensors and incorporating structural and machinery risk analysis, using in-house structural/hydrodynamics and machinery computational tools. Moreover, condition based inspection tools and methodologies, reliability and criticality based maintenance are introduced. An enhanced central database handles ship structures and machinery data. The data is available to ship operators and are utilized by the DSS for ship structures and machinery for continuous monitoring and risk analysis of ship operations. The development and implementation of the INCASS system is shown in the case of a machinery system of a tanker ship. In this way the validation and testing of the INCASS framework will be achieved in realistic operational conditions.