Reliability Analysis and Optimization of the Ship Ballast Water System

ABSTRACT

In this paper, the ship ballast water system was considered as an object of study, and the problem to be solved is to improve its reliability. The reliability of the ship ballast water system is improved to a higher level, as it improves the ship’s safety, because it decides about the stability, running resistance and also the cargo’s safety on the ship. The transportation failure of the ballast water in the ship ballast water system was considered as the top event, thus, a fault tree was established according to the fuzzy set theory, and then the reliability calculation was carried out. Furthermore, the ballast water system was optimized according to the frequent faults occurring in the past, its reliability is calculated again in the same way. The calculated results showed that the optimized ballast water system has a higher reliability value. The core innovation in the study is to solve the problem that involves the uncertainty of randomness and fuzziness by applying a fuzzy number into the fault tree analysis. From the example of reliability analysis of the ship ballast water system, the proposed method of the application of the fuzzy fault tree theory in reliability analysis is verified effectively.

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