On the feasibility of a real time stability assessment for fishing vessels

The authors have proposed their own alternative consisting on an onboard stability guidance system. However, it has some weak points. The aim of this paper is to propose a solution to overcome one of them, the need for crew interaction. In order to do this, and to try to set up a fully automated system, a methodology to estimate the stability of the ship in an automatic and unattended way, based on a frequency analysis of roll motion and on the estimation of the mass moment of inertia of the vessel, is presented. The methodology has been applied to the roll motion time series obtained from a towing tank test campaign of a mid-sized stern trawler, showing good performance.