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Saturday 16 May 2015

Survivability of an ocean patrol vessel – Analysis approach and uncertainty treatment

New published article in Marine Structures:


Abstract (somewhat extended)


Military ocean patrol vessels (OPVs) are today an increasingly common type of naval ship. To facilitate the wide range of tasks with small crews, OPVs represent several ship design compromises between, for example, survivability, redundancy and technical endurance. Some of these compromises are new to military ships.
The aim of this study is to examine how the design risk control options in relation to survivability, redundancy and technical endurance can be linked to the operational risks in a patrol and surveillance scenario where the ship can be attacked by a suicide bomber with an IED in a small boat. The ship operation for a generic OPV, including the actions of the threat, is modeled with a Bayesian network describing the scenario and the dependency among different influences. The probabilities for the consequences to the crew, ship buoyancy and maneuverability as a result of a possible attack are calculated.
The scenario is described with expert data collected from subject matter experts. The approach includes an analysis of uncertainty using Monte Carlo analysis and numerical derivative analysis.
The results show that it is possible to link the performance of specific ship design features to the operational risk. Being able to propagate the epistemic uncertainties through the model is important to understand how the uncertainty in the input affects the output and the output uncertainty for the studied case is small relative to the input uncertainty. The study shows that linking different ship design features for aspects such as survivability, redundancy and technical endurance to the operational risk gives important information for the ship design decision-making process.

Author: Hans Liwång
Department of Military Studies, Swedish Defence University, 11593, Stockholm, Sweden.


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