On the feasibility of a real time stability assessment for fishing vessels

Abstract

[Abstract]: Fishing is one of the sectors with the highest number of accidents worldwide. Many of them are related to stability failures and affect mostly small and medium sized fishing vessels. One of the main reasons is the crew lack of training in stability matters. Due to this, guidance systems have emerged in the last years as a solution to this problem, complying with three main requirements: being simple, being easy to use and being inexpensive to install and maintain.

The authors have proposed their own alternative consisting on an onboard stability guidance system. However, it has some weak points. The aim of this paper is to propose a solution to overcome one of them, the need for crew interaction. In order to do this, and to try to set up a fully automated system, a methodology to estimate the stability of the ship in an automatic and unattended way, based on a frequency analysis of roll motion and on the estimation of the mass moment of inertia of the vessel, is presented. The methodology has been applied to the roll motion time series obtained from a towing tank test campaign of a mid-sized stern trawler, showing good performance.