Development, Testing, and Deployment of Simulation-based Stability Training Tools for Commercial Fishing Vessels

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT This proposal focuses on developing and implementing commercial fishing vessel simulation tools to support marine safety training for commercial fishermen in order to help prevent vessel disasters. The work addresses National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and U.S Coast Guard (USCG) research objectives in the following areas: (1) helping commercial fishermen identify hazardous conditions that lead to vessel disasters, (2) increase the sensitivity of their situational awareness to such hazards, (3) understand how their work practices affect their risk of a vessel disaster and associated occupational hazards, and (4) learn about the most effective risk mitigation actions in high-risk situations. This project aims to accomplish the following: • Customize models for representative commercial fishing vessels (e.g., crab boat, purse seiner vessel, and/or trawler) • Develop vessel stability simulation models to reflect a wide variety of scenarios such as changing operating conditions (equipment and gear handling, fish storage in live tanks or holds), environmental conditions (e.g., winds, waves, ice accretion), and safety-related incidents (flooding, collision, grounding, etc.) for the selected vessels • Design the interactive training tool in a web interface to cater to different learning styles with videos, photographs, animations, case studies, hands-on experience, and self-evaluations. In particular, the user experience will help fishermen to assess a wide range of realistic incident scenarios and to recognize diminishing safety margins (i.e., high risk situations) and appropriate mitigating strategies. • Transfer and deploy the technology to an industry non-profit training organization that will host online the application/lessons for industry use and integrate them with existing/future training programs The team will use in-house or commercial software packages and procedures for the simulations. Simulations for use case could include: (1) dynamic stability demonstration; (2) ship motion in waves; and (3) structural strength demonstration. Our team will leverage the relationships that industry non-profit training organizations have with commercial fishing vessel captains and instructors for marine safety courses provided for commercial fishermen to identify and engage a set of targeted users to provide input into the design/development process, to test the resulting products, and to further improve the work products based on their feedback.