The American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) is an American maritime classification society established in 1862. Its stated mission to promote the security of life, property and the natural environment, primarily through the development and verification of standards for the design, construction and operational maintenance of marine and offshore assets.ABS' core business is to provide global classification services to the marine, offshore and gas industries. As of 2020, ABS was the second largest class society with a classed fleet of over 12,000 commercial vessels and offshore facilities. ABS develops its standards and technical specifications, known collectively as the ABS Rules & Guides. These Rules form the basis for assessing the design and construction of new vessels and the integrity of existing vessels and marine structures.
Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) are increasingly regarded as a promising solution to address crew shortages, improve navigational safety, and improve operational efficiency in the maritime industry. Nevertheless, the reliable deployment of MASS in real-world environments remains a significant challenge, particularly in congested waters where the majority of maritime accidents occur. This emphasizes the need for safe and regulation-aware motion planning strategies for MASS that are capable of operating under dynamic maritime conditions. This paper presents a unified motion planning method for MASS that achieves real time collision avoidance, compliance with International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs), and grounding prevention. The proposed work introduces a convex optimization method that integrates velocity obstacle-based (VO) collision constraints, COLREGs-based directional constraints, and bathymetry-based grounding constraints to generate computationally efficient, rule-compliant optimal velocity selection. To enhance robustness, the classical VO method is extended to consider uncertainty in the position and velocity estimates of the target vessel. Unnavigable shallow water regions obtained from bathymetric data, which are inherently nonconvex, are approximated via convex geometries using a integer linear programming (ILP), allowing grounding constraints to be incorporated into the motion planning. The resulting optimization generates optimal and dynamically feasible input velocities that meet collision avoidance, regulatory compliance, kinodynamic limits, and grounding prevention requirements. Simulation results involving multi-vessel encounters demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in producing safe and regulation-compliant maneuvers, highlighting the suitability of the proposed approach for real time autonomous maritime navigation.
Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) have emerged as a promising solution to enhance navigational safety, operational efficiency, and long-term cost effectiveness. However, their reliable deployment requires rigorous verification and validation (V&V) under various environmental conditions, including extreme and safety-critical scenarios. This paper presents an enhanced virtual simulation framework to support the V&V of MASS in realistic maritime environments, with particular emphasis on the influence of weather and bathymetry on autonomous navigation performance. The framework incorporates a high-fidelity environmental modeling suite capable of simulating adverse weather conditions such as rain, fog, and wave dynamics. The key factors that affect weather, such as rain and visibility, are parameterized to affect sea-state characteristics, perception, and sensing systems, resulting in position and velocity uncertainty, reduced visibility, and degraded situational awareness. Furthermore, high-resolution bathymetric data from major U.S. ports are integrated to enable depth-aware navigation, grounding prevention capabilities, and evaluation of vessel controllability in shallow or confined waterways. The proposed framework offers extensive configurability, enabling systematic testing in a wide spectrum of maritime conditions, including scenarios that are impractical or unsafe to replicate in real-world trials, thus supporting the V&V of MASS.
Floating Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) units are a dominant solution for offshore oil and gas developments where export pipelines are impractical or uneconomic. Power is typically provided by gas turbines burning associated gas, which is attractive economically but results in significant CO2 and methane emissions that are increasingly constrained by regulators, investors and host nations. Alternative decarbonization approaches such as power-from-shore and integration of offshore wind or floating solar can reduce emissions, but they often require extensive grid infrastructure, oversized renewable capacity and large-scale energy storage to reliably meet continuous FPSO loads. These constraints motivate consideration of energy sources that can deliver high-density, continuous, low-carbon heat and power at the point of use while fitting within FPSO space, weight and reliability envelopes. Nuclear power is a candidate, offering 24/7 baseload output with minimal operational greenhouse gas emissions and infrequent fuel logistics. This paper explores the application of a modular, high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) to a VLCC-class FPSO. A HTGR-based SMR concept is integrated into a segregated nuclear island on a 1.5 MMbbl hull and the resulting design is assessed for technical feasibility, safety and indicative economics versus a conventional gas-turbine-powered FPSO. The emphasis is on a coherent case study framework rather than detailed design optimization.
Fatigue assessment of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) remains challenging because fatigue-sensitive regions may occur outside conventional predefined hotspots. This study applies a previously numerically verified full-field fatigue-screening workflow combining Unit Load Response, submodeling, and Virtual Test Rig concepts to the TaidaFloat semi-submersible FOWT under Taiwan Strait environmental conditions. Reconstructed nodal stress histories are used to map hull fatigue and evaluate occurrence-weighted contributions from 182 environmental bins, including operational and typhoon conditions. The results identify fatigue-sensitive regions not only at conventional column–bracing and column–pontoon connections but also in the upper main column and along the turbine–hull load path. Upper column fatigue is mainly associated with turbine-induced bending, whereas lower column and waterline-adjacent regions are more sensitive to wave-induced global hull bending. Frequently occurring near-rated operational conditions dominate the occurrence-weighted hull fatigue contribution, while selected typhoon conditions produce high short-term damage but limited long-term contributions within the four-year dataset. Approximately 94.6% of hull fatigue damage is captured by 28% of the bins, and a common hull–mooring set captures 97.0% of both contributions using 62% of the bins. These findings support hotspot screening and environmental-bin prioritization rather than detailed or certification-level fatigue life prediction.
Abstract The offshore industry is undergoing a structural transition driven by global decarbonization targets and the need for reliable and cost‑effective power. This paper examines the integration of offshore renewable energy sources, primarily wind, with consideration of wave and solar power and with energy storage systems (ESS) to power offshore and nearshore facilities. The study focuses on nearshore floating liquefied natural gas (FLNG) units as a representative application in which external renewable power transmitted through high‑voltage subsea cables, can significantly reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions while maintaining power system reliability. Leveraging the regulatory (i.e., International Marine Organization (IMO) goal-based standards (GBS) framework along with international, statutory and industry standards, the paper defines goals, functional requirements and safety criteria for unconventional hybrid power systems that connect external renewables, subsea cable systems and ESS to offshore installations. It highlights key topside and subsea design drivers, risk mitigation measures and new technology qualification steps necessary for safe deployment of these innovative configurations. The study demonstrates that hybrid systems, properly engineered and verified, can achieve substantial GHG reductions and maintain or improve reliability compared to conventional gas turbine-based power systems. The paper provides a practical classification aligned framework and methodology that can be directly applied by practicing engineers.
