Assessment of Fishing Vessel Vulnerability to Pure Loss of Stability Using a Self-Developed Program

Abstract

A significant proportion of maritime incidents occurring in coastal waters are attributed to small fishing vessels. To analyze the root causes of such maritime accidents, it is imperative to conduct simulations to assess the potential pure loss of stability. This paper proposes a method of using a self-developed program to assess the vulnerability, which could be used in practice for seafarers to maintain shipping safety. To assess the vulnerability of three fishing vessels, the proposed method considers different wave conditions, where the parametric behaviors of the waves relative to the ship’s position (ξG/λ) and wave steepness (H/λ) are explored. Additionally, vulnerability is computed systematically under diverse loading conditions, resulting in visual representations such as 2D and 3D plots. We conduct comparative simulations between the proposed method and the ICS-Hydro STAB. The simulation results reveal that the proposed method has superior accuracy in executing failure probability calculations. The prediction error is consistently below 5%.