Real-time flooding risk evaluation for ship-to-ship collisions based on first principles

Flooding risk identification is a task always treated within a very narrow scope between the life-cycle of a passenger ship. Therefore, different approaches and methods are available for design, operational or onboard applications. Furthermore, the models employed and proposed solutions use simplified methods based on empirical or probabilistic concepts. One of the aims of the EC-founded project FLARE was to promote the use of first principle methods throughout the whole vessel life-cycle, from the design phase up to the onboard risk management. To this end, this work presents the challenges and potential applicability of a real-time flooding risk evaluation methodology for ship-to-ship collisions, based on first-principles calculations. The possibility to perform direct calculations for survivability allows us to define a multi-level approach to flooding risk, separating Level-1 predictions, purely based on semi-empirical models and databases, from Level-2 predictions based on the concept of Potential Loss of Life (PLL). Here, besides a description of the multi-level risk assessment based on PLL, the different tasks of design and operational phases are addressed. Such issues are then linked to the real-time flooding risk evaluation for onboard applications, potentially working for different hazard types but conceptualised for the case of ship-to-ship collisions. The developed method applied to an arbitrary set of models, shows that the approach and tools employed for creating the framework are suitable for a real-time calculation of flooding risk.