Review on Ship Manoeuvrability Criteria and Standards

Possible reduction of the installed power on newly designed merchant ships triggered by requirements of the Energy Efficiency Design Indices (EEDI) raised concern in possible safety degradation and revived interest in manoeuvrability standards to make them capable to compensate for negative effects of underpowering. A substantial part of the present article presents a detailed analytical review of general principles laid in the foundation of consistent safety standards in the naval architecture and analysis of the existing IMO manoeuvrability criteria and standards. Possible ways of extension of the existing standards to embrace situations associated with adverse sea and wind conditions are discussed and modification of the present standards related to the directional stability is considered as one of the possible solutions. At the same time, it was found that introduction of additional standards for the ship controllability in wind is justified, and the second part of the contribution is dedicated to developing a theoretical basis useful for devising such standards. This includes obtaining a set of analytical solutions related to the steady motion in wind and analysis of wind-tunnel data which resulted in simple equations for conservative generalized envelopes for the aerodynamic forces which are especially convenient for standardizing purposes. Possible design decisions aimed at augmentation of the ship’s capacity to resist adverse environmental factors are outlined.</jats:p

Real-Time Parameter Estimation of a Nonlinear Vessel Steering Model Using a Support Vector Machine

The least-square support vector machine (LS-SVM) is used to estimate the dynamic parameters of a nonlinear marine vessel steering model in real-time. First, maneuvering tests are carried out based on a scaled free-running ship model. The parameters are estimated using standard LS-SVM and compared with the theoretical solutions. Then, an online version, a sequential least-square support vector machine, is derived and used to estimate the parameters of vessel steering in real-time. The results are compared with the values estimated by standard LS-SVM with batched training data. By comparison, a sequential least-square support vector machine can dynamically estimate the parameters successfully, and it can be used for designing a dynamic model-based controller of marine vessels.acceptedVersio