STABILITY FAILURE ANALYSIS IN THE OPERATIONS OF FLOATING DRY DOCKS

Abstract

The main area of this work reflects a topic for which there is little or limited reference available and is carried out to meet the needs of professional and practical floating dry dock operators. The risk of hazards in floating dry docks is evaluated using a discrete fuzzy set theory (FST) and an evidential reasoning (ER) approach in a situation where historical failure data is not available. Fuzzy set modelling is used to estimate the safety levels of the causes of basic failure events in floating dry docks due to stability concerns using the concept of linguistic variables, and provides a framework for dealing with such variables in a systematic way. The ER approach is used to synthesise the estimated safety levels of the causes of hazards/basic hazard events. The results of this work will be valuable to dry dock masters and sister maritime engineering professionals.