Cargo Stowage Planning in RoRo
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- Category: Seguridad marítima
- Published on Wednesday, 15 October 2014 22:46
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http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:566111/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Optimisation Based
Naval Architecture
Eivind Wathne
Marine Technology (2 year)
Supervisor: Bjørn Egil Asbjørnslett, IMT
Co-supervisor: Jørgen Rakke, IØT
Department of Marine Technology
Submission date: June 2012
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Background
The shipping world has in the later years experienced a boom, with high and persistent rate levels.
However, nothing grows without limits into the sky, and with the financial crises emerging mid-2008,
questions were raised whether all shipping prospects and new-building activity would see robust and
viable commercial life. One of the key issues in ship-owner/ship-operator planning is the strategic
planning of the size and mix of the fleet of vessels, known generically as fleet size and mix problems
(FSMP). FSMPs are dominated by uncertainty in several dimensions, given fluctuating and changing
market demands, changing opportunities that may become open for different types and sizes of
vessels, redesign of transport networks, as well as upcoming or changing physical or regulatory
“bottlenecks”. Questions like;
- Given transport demand and network, how may our current fleet be utilised in the best
possible and/or emission effective way, and how should our fleet be developed to meet future
market and network opportunities, as well as emission regulations?
- How may changing network structure or fleet mix best achieve a given improvement in
performance measurements?
Are among the important decisions that ship-owners have to make to position their fleet of vessels in
commercial market operations, as well as meet the regulatory requirements. From the regulators side,
the same questions may be addressed with the focus of what the effect and cost of specific regulations
could be, given available fleet applicable measures of technology.
Objective
This thesis shall contribute with knowledge of the applicability and models for use of operations
research in cargo stowage planning in the RoRo shipping segment. The focus will be stowage in an
operational planning perspective.
Tasks
From a naval architecture perspective, one of the more important aspects of stowage on a vessel is the
vessel’s intact stability.
A published article and optimisation model on the matter will be used as a reference.
This model shall be expanded to include tighter stability constraints and other constraints that
mimic reality.
The expanded model shall be implemented in commercial optimisation software and the
stowage plans will be checked with more exact hydrostatic calculations to ensure that the
stability is indeed satisfactory.