Overview
In the day-to-day ship operations, structural and machinery failures may lead to major accidents, endangering crew and passengers lives onboard, posing a threat to the environment, damaging the ship itself and having a great impact in terms of business losses. Moreover, with the introduction and building of a big number of new ships, their monitoring and inspection from both regulatory bodies and Classification Societies has become more and more difficult in order to obtain the optimum inspection results and eliminating the hazards posed by high-risk and sub-standard ships. In this respect, the INCASS (Inspection Capabilities for Enhanced Ship Safety) project brings together a range of experienced and dedicated partners in order to tackle the issue of ship inspection, identification of high-risk ships, providing access to information related to ship surveys independent of the ship’s flag and inspection regime and moreover incorporate enhanced and harmonised cooperation of maritime stakeholders in order to avoid ship accidents, promote maritime safety and protect the environment.
The INCASS consortium aims to bring an innovative solution to the ship inspection regime through the introduction of enhanced inspection of ship structures based on robotic platforms, providing ship structures and machinery monitoring with real time information using ‘intelligent’ sensors and incorporate Structural and Machinery Risk Analysis. Moreover, by introducing Condition Based inspection tools and methodologies, reliability and criticality based maintenance, providing an enhanced Central Database including ship structures and machinery available to maritime authorities (e.g. EMSA, Port State Control), Classification Societies and ship operators and eventually by developing a Decision Support System for ship structures and machinery for continuous monitoring and risk analysis and management of ship operations.