Data Assimilation-based Simultaneous Phase-Resolved Ocean Wave and Ship Motion Forecast

This paper presents a data-assimilation (DA)-based approach to forecast the phase-resolved wave evolution process and ship motion, which is developed by coupling the high-order spectral method (HOS), ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF), and a Cummins-equation-based ship model (CMI). With the developed EnKF-HOS-CMI method, the observation data for wave, ship, or both can be incorporated into the model, therefore producing the optimal analysis results. The developed method is validated and tested based on a synthetic problem on the motions of an irregular wave field and a box-shaped free-floating ship. We show that the EnKF-HOS-CMI method achieves much higher accuracy in the long-term simulation of nonlinear phase-resolved wave field and ship motion in comparison with the HOS-CMI method. Also, the ship parameters are estimated accurately by using a parameter-augmented state space in EnKF.