Dynamic Blackout Probability Monitoring System for Cruise Ship Power Plants

Abstract

Stringent environmental regulations and efforts to improve the shipping operations sustainability have resulted in designing and employing more complex configurations for the ship power plants systems and the implementation of digitalised functionalities. Due to these systems complexity, critical situations arising from the components and subsystem failures, which may lead to accidents, require timely detection and mitigation. This study aims at enhancing the safety of ship complex systems and their operation by developing the concept of an integrated monitoring safety system that employs existing safety models and data fusion from shipboard sensors. Detailed Fault Trees that model the blackout top event, representing the sailing modes of a cruise ship and the operating modes of its plant, are employed. Shipboard sensors’ measurements acquired by the cruise ship alarm and monitoring system are integrated with these Fault Trees to account for the acquired shipboard information on the investigated power plant configuration and its components operating conditions, thus, facilitating the estimation of the blackout probability time variation as well as the dynamic criticality assessment of the power plant components. The proposed concept is verified by using a virtual simulation environment developed in Matlab/Simulink. This study supports the dynamic assessment of the ship power plants and therefore benefits the decision-making for enhancing the plant safety during operations.