Sensitivity Analysis of Wind Affected Maneuverability of Tugboat-Controlled Ships

Maritime transport in narrow canals and crowded harbours has received considerable attention during the past few years due to the incident in the Suez Canal. Maneuvering a large container ship effectively, ensuring safety in a confined space, is a challenging problem. One way of overcoming this challenge is using tugboats in critical areas under the supervision of responsible pilots. These operations pose more challenges under extreme weather conditions and may lead to accidents, monetary losses, and loss of lives. This strongly suggests the need for automated assistant systems. In [1], the maneuverability of tugboat-controlled ships under the influence of wind is investigated by deriving a dynamic model for the ship which takes tugboat and wind forces into account, and calculating critical wind speeds based on this model. This delivers a risk assessment about the maneuverability of a desired maneuver. In this paper, we provide a sensitivity analysis for the work presented in [1] to investigate how the critical wind speeds are influenced by changing environmental situations.