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A recent survey showed the reluctance of shipowners to install ballast water treatment systems onboard their ships. This raised a question on the acceptability of shipboard management of ballast water and the need to investigate the potential of non-shipboard alternatives to managing the menace of invasive species transfer via ships' ballast water. The aim of this article is to investigate the viability of both shipboard and onshore-based concepts of ballast water management with respect to the evaluation criteria stipulated in the Ballast Water Management Convention of the International Maritime Organization. To achieve that, an appropriate decision-making technique was selected using a robust procedure; this is critical in the evaluation and ultimate selection of an appropriate ballast water management method. A multi-criteria decision-making technique known as intuitionistic fuzzy multi-attribute axiomatic design which is a hybridized extension of fuzzy axiomatic design was employed for the selection process. The eventual selected technique was used to evaluate the ballast water management options based on the linguistic data collected from an interview with ballast water management experts. The novel applications of intuitionistic fuzzy multi-attribute axiomatic design in this article for technique selection and subsequently for ballast water management methods' evaluation exemplify not only the versatility of the technique as a decision-making tool but also showed a strong paradigm shift in experts' opinions about the future of ballast water management beyond just the traditional shipboard system.

This paper presents a novel methodology in the design and performance enhancement of a regulation-compliant Ballast Water Management (BWM) System, where three methodologies were integrated in the process. The application of the multi-functional framework of classical Axiomatic Design (AD) in developing a design matrix was firstly modified using the influence of the Software-Hardware-Environment-Liveware interaction concept to factor all the system's interacting elements into the solution design. The BWM Convention was used as a guide to identify the requirements for the proposed system design. The identified AD couplings in the design matrix were then analysed using Sufield technique; a concept of Altshuler's Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. The design's most promising performance enhancement pathways were subsequently determined and prioritised.

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