Accelerated Life Testing in Maritime Critical Systems

Climate change and the ice melting in the Arctic zone is a major environmental and geopolitical issue as well. Due to this phenomenon, cargo vessels are able to follow new maritime routes though the Arctic zone and also new energy resources fields are accessible. This change is a major challenge for maritime industry players, affecting maritime industry in many aspects. One aspect is that of the journey shortening from East Asia to Northern Europe, increasing transportation capacity and resulting finally to significant cost cuts for maritime industry stakeholders. A broad use of the new northern routes for the international trade leads to the use of ships that are not constructed according to extreme weather standards. Although Multi state systems and Markov chains are a reliable analysis tool for systems' availability assessment, the polar zone's extreme weather conditions affect the availability of the onboard systems, increasing its assessment's uncertainty. This paper is an attempt to model such changes on the expected availability of maritime critical systems. Combining the direct effect of polar weather conditions on the systems onboard with Markov chains and Multi State Systems modelling, Accelerated Life Testing theory is an additional research tool, contributing to the reduction of the uncertainty imposed by the new factors.

Keywords: Markov chain, Multi state systems, Accelerated life testing, Maritime transportation, Maritime routes.

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