An Assessment of Stability and Strength of a Container Ship for Safety Compliance in Cargo Loading Plans

Abstract

According to accident case studies, one of the causes of accidents involving container ships was often the incorrectly declared weight of the container. For this reason, the International Maritime Organization introduced an amendment to the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, requiring the verification of container weight declared in the transport document. It partially solved the problem of accurate determination of container ship stability, although an error of 5% by weight is accepted. In this study, using the Macs3 program, the weight of 100 containers was changed by 5% to assess how such a situation affects the ship’s stability. It was found that even a slight change in the weight can affect stability. There are other problems that have to be addressed, e.g., loading of the containers as per positions in the loading plan or sharing information about mass distribution inside. In the last part, Ishikawa’s diagram was used to determine the relationship between the causes and their effect on the accident of MSC Napoli in an attempt to determine other factors that may have contributed to the container ship’s accident and highlight the need to systematize the rules and tools connected to container ship weighing.