Risk forecast system for moored ships

Abstract

Port terminals downtimes lead to large economic losses and largely affect the port’s overall competitiveness. In the majority of cases, port activities such as ships’ approach maneuvers and loading/unloading operations, are conditioned or suspended, based solely on weather or wave forecasts. These forecasts do not always result in effective hazardous conditions for the ships. Additionally, moored ships often experience problems of excessive movements and mooring forces in apparent good weather conditions. If, instead, one could forecast the ships’ movements and mooring forces, risk assessment would be much more accurate. This would allow selecting an appropriate reinforced mooring arrangement and thus minimizing effective terminal downtime. In this paper, the development of a risk forecast system for moored ships, that takes into account all of the moored ship’s system, is detailed and an illustration on how it applies to real ports is presented. The system was first developed to the Praia da Vitória Port (Pinheiro et al. 2018), followed by the ports of S. Roque do Pico and Madalena do Pico, in the Azores archipelago and is now being developed for the port of Sines, Portugal.