Case Study of the Probabilistic Damage Assessment of Ships

From a theoretical point of view, the probabilistic approach can be considered a more suitable methodology to address the safety problem of a damaged ship, because it permits to analyze the ship characteristics and the damage scenario in a more specific way, offering rational model for assessing the survivability of the ship. Some significant difficulties arise for the method implementation anyway, mainly because of the complexity of the physical problem of a damaged ship and for the several parameters which are to be taken into account. The new regulations are therefore more robust and detailed, but also rather complicated. In this paper an application of the probabilistic approach, for the damage stability assessment, is considered for the selected case of a Ro-Ro passenger ship. Within a simplified model of an existing Ro-Ro passenger ship, geometrical characteristics are varied, in order to investigate the influence of the internal subdivision on the attained subdivision index A.