Condition monitoring for enhanced inspection, maintenance and decision making in ship operations

Abstract

This paper presents the INCASS (Inspection Capabilities for Enhanced Ship Safety) project which brings innovative solutions to the ship inspection regime by integrating robotic-automated platforms for on-line or on-demand ship inspection activities and selecting the software and hardware tools that can implement or facilitate specific inspection tasks, to provide in- put to the Decision Support System (DSS). Enhanced inspection of ships includes ship structures and machinery monitoring with real time information using ‘intelligent’ sensors and incorporating structural and machinery risk analysis, using in-house structural/hydrodynamics and machinery computational tools. Condition based inspection tools and methodologies, reliability and criticality based maintenance are introduced. An enhanced central database handles ship structures and machinery data. The development and implementation of the INCASS system is shown in the case of ship machinery systems. In this way the validation and testing of the INCASS framework will be achieved in realistic operational conditions.