Use of hybrid approach in facilitation of design of ship hydrostatic parameters under uncertainty

Abstract

Hydrostatic parameters of a ship are very important in ship design. The importance of the parameters compared to one another need to be revealed in realm of uncertainty, so as to avoid design error. In view of this, a fuzzy-analytical hierarchical process (Fuzzy-AHP) method is utilized in addressing the subject under investigation. The fuzzy logic is used to address uncertainty in pairwise comparison exercise, so as to facilitate the estimation of order of importance of hydrostatic parameters. In this research, the engineering judgements of three designers in analysis of importance of hydrostatic parameters are aggregated and processed using the Fuzzy-AHP methodology. The result produced in the study showed that hydrostatic parameters are importance in order of moments of inertia of vessels (MIV), mass displacement (MD), tons per centimeter immersion (TPCI), coefficients of form (CF), centers of buoyancy (CB), metacentric heights of vessels (MHV), ship waterplane area (SWA), longitudinal center of floatation (LCF), volume displacement (VD) and wetted surface area (WSA) with weight values of 0.