This research is based on the real-ship accident report of the Cruise vessel Norwegian Star, which resulted in the loss of ship propulsion. For performing this FMECA study of the thirteen failure modes (FMs) of propulsion module sub-system, experts’ team comprised of fourteen professionals from the Ship's Marine Engineering department provided their insight and input for completing this research. However, for the calculations of FRPN values, the risk assessment parameters such as occurrence (O), severity (S) and non-detection (D) are used. Artificial intelligence technique such as the Interval type-2 (IT-2) fuzzy expert system is integrated with FMECA (Failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis) for performing quantitative risk assessment. Based on the results obtained, the Propulsion stator failure had the highest FRPN (Fuzzy risk prioritization number) values.
The subject of ship safety, in particular Marine systems safety is significant in the Cruise shipping business in order to avert serious marine accidents and their impacts on cruise industry, the environment, crew and the passengers being transported. Cruise shipping carries significant hazards and in past it experienced catastrophic accidents such as historical titanic disaster of 1912, which resulted in the loss of 1,503 lives, and two other high-profile recent incidents of Costa Concordia and the Carnival Triumph engine room fire (IMO (GISIS), n.d.). Such accidents caused a serious threat to the safety of the passengers, crew members onboard, environment as well as inflicting mechanical damage, ship operational disruptions, and other financial losses.
In order to eradicate such incidents, today's modern cruise liners are subject to a plethora of standards and regulations governing almost every element and technical aspect of ship design and operation. Since the cruise ships consist of technically complex machines, minor fires, power outages, and propulsion issues do occur, however, unlike most of the other kinds of vessel accidents such incidents rarely jeopardize cruise safety. The reason for improved safety of cruise vessels at sea is wide ranging adopted safety rules and regulations for minimizing marine accidents and adaptation of latest innovations such as Pod Propulsion.
