Ballast Water Quality Compliance Monitoring Using IoT

Abstract

Pumping sea water from the ballast tank is inevitable so as to stabilize the ship at every time the freight is uploaded or unloaded. However, this water holds a variety of organisms that embrace living species, microbes and viruses that belong to the coastal and marine biome. These organisms become alien when the ballast is discharged into the sea. These Martian species can bring hazards to ecosystem and biodiversity apart from environmental, social and financial impacts on the water region where the ballast water is discharged. Therefore, it is important that each ship shall invest in a ballast water treatment system as per the guidelines laid out by the statutory agencies. A worldwide regulatory is required to inculcate a uniform compliance on the treatment of ballast water. This paper, as an attempt towards this direction, explores the regulations for ballast water treatment system and studies the methodologies used for the treatment and proposes an automatic and intelligent system, which continuously monitors the compliance of the treated water using internet-of-things (IoT).