INTEGRATING SIMULATION INTO A WEB-BASED DECISION
SUPPORT TOOL FOR THE COST EFFECTIVE PLANNING OF
VESSEL DISMANTLING PROCESSES
Charalambia Pylarinou, Dimitrios Koumanakos, Antonios Hapsas
Nikos Karacapilidis and Emmanuel Adamides
Industrial Management and Information Systems Lab, MEAD, University of Patras, 26504 Rio Patras, Greece
Keywords: Decision Support Systems, Simulation Modeling, Vessel Dismantling.
Abstract: Vessel dismantling is a complex process, which requires advanced planning subject to environmentally safe
as well as cost and energy effective standards. Aiming to facilitate stakeholders involved in such activities
and augment the quality of their related decision making, this paper presents an innovative decision support
system that takes into account the diversity of the associated constraints (i.e. available resources,
environmental issues, health and safety of the workforce, etc.). The proposed system aids stakeholders make
decisions on qualitative issues such as the appropriateness of a disposal methodology or the level of the
safety of the workforce in a specific dismantling yard. Being seamlessly integrated with a visual interactive
simulation environment, the system facilitates the collaborative design and redesign of dismantling
processes.
1 INTRODUCTION
Ship dismantling related activities like scheduling,
control, and capacity planning require information,
knowledge and experience that reside in a diverse
set of organizational assets (including employees,
structure, culture and processes). Due to the need of
conducting experimentations before making
decisions and the usefulness of simulation models to
manage long range planning decisions, the overall
management of these activities can be significantly
aided by the employment of a simulation-based
Decision Support System (DSS).
The exploitation of advanced information
technology in the area of ship dismantling and
recycling is focused on the electronic recording of
ships’ characteristics, materials and associated
technologies (Ahluwalia and Govindarajul, 2005), as
well as on shipyard simulation modeling (Peters et
al., 2001). Systems like the one described in (Kuhl et
al., 2005), which allows planners and managers to
enter information into the models and generate
output reports enhancing decision making, and
DOVE (Dismantling of Obsolete Vessels), which
encapsulates a large database (Rashpal et al., 2004),
neglect a series of important analysis and
collaboration features.
On the contrary, this paper proposes an innovative
simulation-based DSS for the collaborative
modeling and management of dismantling processes
through dynamic simulation, allowing strong
analytical modelling of the related processes. The
overall approach followed during its development
aims at strengthening the synergy of knowledge
management and decision making by the integration
of experimentation features. The proposed web-
based system supports collaborative design,
planning, execution and improvement of dismantling
and materials absorbing processes. It is based on the
Co-LEAN software suite (Adamides et al., 2006),
and is able to share knowledge and information
across different dismantling yards, as well as
between yards, obsolete ship brokers and customers.
2 THE PROPOSED SYSTEM
The proposed system utilizes discrete-event
simulation models to produce generic guidelines and
rules for scheduling the dismantling process of
vessels with respect to environmental and
544
Pylarinou C., Koumanakos D., Hapsas A., Karacapilidis N. and Adamides E. (2008).
INTEGRATING SIMULATION INTO A WEB-BASED DECISION SUPPORT TOOL FOR THE COST EFFECTIVE PLANNING OF VESSEL DISMAN-
TLING PROCESSES.
In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - AIDSS, pages 544-547
DOI: 10.5220/0001710105440547
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

occupational safety, health, cost and energy effective
issues.
Large databases, built in Microsoft® Access, are
linked with Microsoft® Excel tables, which in turn
are exploited by the Extend simulation software,
where a generic model of the dismantling process
taking place at a ship yard has been designed. The
dismantling process comprises a series of
hierarchically structured sub-activities, for which all
necessary parameters have been taken into account
(including capacities, resources, average demand
and dismantling rate). The end user has the
capability to populate fields in a user-friendly web
interface and obtain the results of a dynamic analysis
on appropriate output interfaces.
2.1 DSS Architecture
As mentioned above, the proposed system exploits a
simulation model built in Extend simulation
software, which is installed in a server. Components
of the simulation model are connected through
ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) technology
with the database. A runtime development kit
allows the simulation model to run at the
background, without (direct) user interference. In
this way, any user who is not familiar with
simulation modeling can run the model directly from
the web interfaces, without having the burden to deal
with simulation technicalities.
The system’s interfaces have been designed by
exploiting an open source Content Management
System (CMS). Their content consists of html pages,
dynamic asp pages, forms, icons and forums to
support communication among users. Moreover,
other features offered through those features include
document repositories, flowcharts, and support for
information search. Depending on user’s requests,
some outputs are the outcome of simple data
processing (e.g. comparisons, matching, etc.), while
some others are the result of modeling simulations.
Records can be easily withdrawn from a data
repository, while new documents, guidelines and
regulations can be uploaded or downloaded in the
database through an appropriate link.
2.2 DSS Web interfaces
The system aims at serving the following types of
users; i) dismantling site owners, ii) broker
companies, iii) third party official delegates, and iv)
environmental and energy related organizations.
Users have the ability to populate the databases,
select from predefined data and models, obtain
results based on selected inputs and retrieve
information from historical records.
Figure 1: Broker input page.
A broker company can see in advance all the
available (and suitable) yards to dismantle
environmentally and cost effectively a vessel,
provided that the characteristics, properties and
functions of the particular vessel are known (Fig. 1).
The system will propose the “best fit” yard found,
showing its characteristics in detail. The system
compares all technical, environmental, occupational,
and recycling characteristics of the existing yards
(stored in the database) with the characteristics of
the vessel that needs to be dismantled.
Figure 2: Third party official delegate input page.
Third-party delegates (i.e. European Union IMO,
ILO, etc.) want to assure the compliance of a
vessel’s dismantling process against environmental,
safety and energy guidelines. These requests, which
are time irrelevant, are handled through the
appropriate information processing (matching). For
example, a user can indicate a specific vessel that is
about to be dismantled in a specific yard (see Figure
2), and automatically know if some materials will
not be able to be treated or disposed safely, or what
the chances of a human accident are due to
inadequate safety conditions at this yard. Moreover,
INTEGRATING SIMULATION INTO A WEB-BASED DECISION SUPPORT TOOL FOR THE COST EFFECTIVE
PLANNING OF VESSEL DISMANTLING PROCESSES
545

they can get information about whether a specific
yard has experienced staff to execute a dangerous or
high skilled technology or how safe the treatment
and disposal of produced wastes can be.
Similarly, environmental organizations are able to
view information about the materials and the
components produced, as well as their disposal and
treatment history.
3 SIMULATION-BASED
DECISION MAKING SUPPORT
The simulation models incorporated in our approach
provide sufficient information regarding resource
utilization, lead times and costs both for each
operation of the dismantling process and in total.
The calculated critical parameters include the
resources capacity, the total cost of the dismantling
process, and the total time the process is about to
last. Other parameters of high interest are each
activity’s cost and lead time. Provided that these
parameters are known, it becomes easier for a user
to identify critical activities which need
improvement or seem to be extremely costly. The
accurate scheduling of the dismantling operations,
through simulation modeling, will evaluate the
performance of these critical parameters and
eventually lead to an energy and cost effective
dismantling process.
3.1 Integration of Simulation
Modelling
A generic dismantling process, consisted of nine
activities, is modeled in Extend. All input data are
inserted in the model through a web interface, where
the user can select activities and enter numerical
values.
Figure 3: Inserted data in Extend.
Simulation blocks draw data from appropriately
structured files (Fig. 3). Data resulted from
simulation runs are demonstrated through
appropriate user interfaces.
Figure 4: Dismantling site owner output interface.
Data contained in the database include generic
vessel and dismantling site attributes, as well as
specific information associated with components,
materials, workforce, technologies and recycling
methods. Fig. 4 refers to a list of a ship dismantling
process. The user may edit the values of the
parameters (i.e. the number of equipment, the cost of
workers per day,
the cost of tools, etc.) of the
existing activities in the yard under consideration
(the interface also allows the user to define new
activities).
When the whole process has been fully described
(numerically), the “Next” button triggers the
execution of simulation in Extend. When the
simulation run is completed, the associated results
(concerning well-defined cost and time related
parameters) are being displayed in a new window
(Fig. 5).
Figure 5: Dismantling site owner output interface.
According to these results, the user can reconfigure
the input values, run again the model and obtain new
results. Consequently, managers can simulate the
ICEIS 2008 - International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems
546

process scheduling and plan the breaking and
recycling activities based on tested and accepted
parameter values (liable to cost and energy
effectiveness).
3.2 Results and Rescheduling
The simulation model considers not only a list of
scheduling parameters, such as the already
mentioned input data, but it also incorporates a
variety of performance metrics. Descriptive tables
and charts can demonstrate graphically the
performance of the metrics in interest, and give
necessary information for the user’s decision making
(Fig. 6).
Figure 6: Simulation results concerning performance
metrics.
The advantage of employing a simulation
environment in the core of the proposed DSS is the
ability of users to dynamically specify process
parameters. In this way, a user is able to know in
advance the performance of the process and decide
about its appropriateness. When the results are not
satisfying, the user can change the input parameters
until achieving the desired level of results.
4 CONCLUSIONS
This paper has described a DSS that effectively
integrates simulation modeling to help diverse types
of ship dismantling stakeholders decide on the
appropriate planning of the breaking and recycling
processes. Simulation is used to dynamically
measure the performance of the individual
operations and the overall process as far as the
capacities, delay times and costs are concerned. The
system is easy-to-use and requires no particular
simulation expertise. Moreover, it comprises a
knowledge repository that may facilitate and
enhance various (both individual and organizational)
knowledge management processes.
Future work directions concern the enhancement of
the proposed system towards alleviating the need of
requiring a simulation facilitator, and the expansion
of the associated databases in order to add more
detail in the scheduling of the dismantling process.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work presented in this paper is partially funded
by the European Union, through the “ShipDismantl:
Cost Effective and Environmentally Sound
Dismantling of Obsolete Vessels” Project (Specific
Targeted Research Project, IST FP6-2003,
Transport-3 Call, TST4-CT-2005, Contract No:
012561).
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PLANNING OF VESSEL DISMANTLING PROCESSES
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