A decision-making framework for planning lifecycle ballast water treatment compliance

This paper introduces a novel decision-making framework for planning lifecycle compliance of ballast water treatment by applying eigenvalue spectral analysisto the ship-centric Markov decision process (SC-MDP) framework. This method focuses on identifying the relationships of various decision making scenarios, and how those relationships change through time. The objective is to understand both these relationships and the impact of initial technology selection on lifecycle ballast water compliance. Two metrics are used. First, the optimal lifecycle strategy is presented for technology selection. Second,the set of dominant eigenvalues is used as a metric to identify the number of unique, initial condition dependent design absorbing paths the process may converge to. Sensitivity studies are performed examining the affect of policy strength on preferred compliance strategy.Ship Design, Production and Operation