Optimized Ballast Water Exchange Management for Bulk Carrier

BULK 선용자동 Ballast Water Management Plan 개발

Many port states such as New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Canada have strict regulations to prevent ships which arrive in their port from discharging polluted ballast water which contain harmful aquatic organism and pathogens. They are notified that transfer of polluted ballast water can cause serious injury to public health and damage to property and environment. For this reason, they perceived that the ballast exchange in deep sea is the most effective method, together with submitting the ballast management plan which contains the effective exchange method, ballast system and safety consideration. In this study, we pursued both nautical engineering analysis and optimization of algorithm in order to generate the sequence of stability and rapidity. Heuristic Algorithm was chosen on the basis of optimality and applicability to a sequential exchange problem. We have built an optimized algorithm, for automatic exchange of ballast water, by redefining core elements of the $A^\ast$ algorithm, such as node, operator and evaluation function. Final version of the optimized algorithm has been applied to existing bulk carrier and the performance of the algorithm has been verified successfully.