Optimizing Ship Structural Integrity Management: Opportunistic Maintenance with Corrosion Prediction

This paper presents a novel Opportunistic Maintenance Cost and Risk Optimization (OMCRO) framework, designed to optimize maintenance decisions. The framework integrates economic and reliability considerations, leveraging an opportunistic repair grouping process as a payoff for quantitative risk reduction. Specifically, it is applied in this work to address the structural integrity management of ships, considering probabilistic corrosion models. Through metaheuristic optimization, it seeks a good trade-off between operational risks and repair costs, providing clear guidance for stakeholders on what, when, and where to survey and repair, as well as understanding the associated costs and risks. Simulation results demonstrate the framework’s efficacy in aligning with industry standards while offering valuable insights for academia, engineers, surveyors, shipyards, Classification Societies, and asset managers involved in ship structural integrity management.