Maritime Security Enhanced: A Fuzzy Logic Approach to Bilge and Flooding Risk Assessment in Warships

To maintain a ship’s stability, early detection of bilges and flooding is crucial. Loss of the stability will lead to risk of life and property on-board ships. In order to identify bilge/flooding sites and ring alarm with an audible and visual warning that specifies the bilge location/area on a monitoring panel, ships are equipped with traditional bilge alarm systems. In the aspect of a war ship, flooding risk is higher than that of a cargo/merchant ship. Due to that, conventional monitoring systems have become inefficient to assure safety of life out at sea. Hence, the proposed system is designed to logically reason many aspects of bilge and flooding to give accurate bilge alarms and support decision making. Fuzzy logic has been found as an emerging technology in the research field to comply this research gap. In the proposed system, sensors have been utilized to acquire input variables in real time. Output is forwarded to the end user after applying Mamdani fuzzy inference to decide the bilge/flooding condition and risk severity of the ship. Center of Gravity (COG) de-fuzzification method has been applied to extract the crisp value of the risk severity as a percentage. The test results have been evaluated after installing on-board a warship. The input and output fuzzy membership functions have been optimized by evaluating the results based on domain expert knowledge. Thus, the determined risk factor is proved to be sound enough to take efficient and effective action against flooding or high bilges.