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The need for decision support after a flooding casualty requires the development of fast and accurate progressive flooding simulation procedures. Here, a new quasi-static technique is presented, proposing a differential algebraic formulation capable to consider independently the flooding process in the internal rooms. The proposed method is efficient while simulating long flooding chains along rooms connected by similar size openings, a condition that likely occurs on large passenger ships. Moreover, the computational performances of the simulation procedure have been enhanced by adapting the time step to the progressive flooding pace. The adoption of an adaptive time step algorithm reduces significantly the calculation time. The novel procedure has been tested on the recommended benchmark cases for flooding simulations, highlighting the accuracy and flexibility of the proposed method.

For the natural gas transportation, several technologies can be applied, having different effectiveness and costs depending on the analysed case. The Mediterranean Sea is presenting a typical scenario where compressed natural gas (CNG) transportation is particularly attractive compared to liquefied natural gas (LNG) and pipelines, not only for stranded gas shipping but also for transportations cases where CNG is usually representing the most economically convenient solution. Approaching the design of a CNG ship is not an easy task, since the pressure vessel (PV) technology is strongly influencing the ship layout and hull form. Here an enhanced conceptual design method is adopted; taking into account the economic-financial issues together with logistics, in order to determine the best fleet composition selecting the best ships for the selected scenario. The ships composing the fleet are supposed to load/offload the natural gas on buoys; hence, dynamic positioning (DP) will also be considered as an attribute in the evaluation of alternative designs. As final outcome of the enhanced concept design process it will be possible to speed up drawing of the preliminary lines plan and general arrangement plan of the sister ships composing the fleet.

The increasing sensibility to the environment protection and emission reduction in the atmosphere is also influencing the maritime shipping. The more restrictive regulations on pollutants suggest the adoption of alternative onboard propulsion and energy generation systems. To this end, electrification is a promising solution for pollution reduction, giving some flexibility on the strategy to use for the onboard system. Moreover, a hybrid-electric system can be combined with the exploitation of green fuel, increasing the potential reduction of total emissions. However, the final efficiency, both in term of emission reduction and expected operative expenditure, is strongly influenced by the operative profile of the vessel. This is of utmost importance both in case of a newly designed vessel and in the retrofitting of an existing one. In the present work, the impact of electrification on a double-ended ferry is presented, taking into consideration the operative profile of the vessel derived from real navigation data.

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To face the design of a new ship concept, the evaluation of multiple feasible solutions concerning several aspects of naval architecture and marine engineering is necessary. Compressed natural gas technologies are in continuous development; therefore, there are no available databases for existing ships to use as a basis for the design process of a new unit. In this sense, the adoption of a modern multi-attribute decision-based method can help the designer for the study of a completely new ship prototype. A database of compressed natural gas ships was generated starting from a baseline hull, varying six hull-form parameters by means of the design of experiment technique. Between the attributes involved in the concept design process, stability is for sure one of the most relevant topics, both for intact and damaged cases. This work describes two approaches to identify the compliance of a ship with the intact stability regulations based on the ship main geometrical quantities. Moreover, a metamodel based on the maximum floodable length concept (damage stability) allows determining the main internal subdivision of the ship. The metamodel outcomes were compared with results from direct calculations on a ship external to the database, highlighting the adequate accuracy given by the developed methods.

The aim of this concept paper is the description of a new tool to support institutions in the implementation of targeted countermeasures, based on quantitative and multi-scale elements, for the fight and prevention of emergencies, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. The tool is a cloud-based centralized system; a multi-user platform that relies on artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for the processing of heterogeneous data, which can produce as an output the level of risk. The model includes a specific neural network which is first trained to learn the correlations between selected inputs, related to the case of interest: environmental variables (chemical–physical, such as meteorological), human activity (such as traffic and crowding), level of pollution (in particular the concentration of particulate matter) and epidemiological variables related to the evolution of the contagion. The tool realized in the first phase of the project will serve later both as a decision support system (DSS) with predictive capacity, when fed by the actual measured data, and as a simulation bench performing the tuning of certain input values, to identify which of them led to a decrease in the degree of risk. In this way, we aimed to design different scenarios to compare different restrictive strategies and the actual expected benefits, to adopt measures sized to the actual needs, adapted to the specific areas of analysis and useful for safeguarding human health; and we compared the economic and social impacts of the choices. Although ours is a concept paper, some preliminary analyses have been shown, and two different case studies are presented, whose results have highlighted a correlation between NO2, mobility and COVID-19 data. However, given the complexity of the virus diffusion mechanism, linked to air pollutants but also to many other factors, these preliminary studies confirmed the need, on the one hand, to carry out more in-depth analyses, and on the other, to use AI algorithms to capture the hidden relationships among the huge amounts of data to process.

Nowadays, it is of paramount importance reducing the pollutant emission also of small crafts operating near the coast. This action is an essential issue to preserve the marine and coastal environment. In this paper, the design of a coastal-navigation multipurpose craft to be used in North Adriatic Sea area is presented. The particular service areas are characterized both by inland waterways with shallow and restricted waters and by open sea. Hull-form of the craft along with hybrid-electric propulsion have been properly designed in order to obtain an efficient solution for the different operational conditions. Specifically, the hybrid-electric power system has been conceived to allow the Zero Emission Mode navigation for a reasonable range