Ship structures are likely to be subject to age-related deterioration such as corrosion wastage, cracking or mechanical damage. It has reportedly been recognised that such age-related deterioration is almost always involved in the catastrophic failures of ship structures including total losses. While such accidents typically cause concern to the public, maintenance and repair of aged structures is quite costly and complex. It is thus of great importance to develop advanced technologies allowing for proper management and control of such age-related deterioration. This paper summarises the report of the ISSC 2006 Committee V.6 presenting current practices, recent advances and future trends on condition assessment of aged ships. This includes assessment of the structural condition in view of the serviceability and safety, methods for repair, quantification of strength of deteriorated and repaired ships (as well as criteria for acceptable damage), with due account of the uncertainties involved. Consideration is also given to cost–benefit and risk-based decision procedures for remedial actions.

This paper describes the design of an efficient parallel implementation of an ice simulator that simulates the behaviour of a ship operating in pack ice. The main idea of the method is to treat ice as a set of discrete objects with very simple properties, and to model the system mechanics mainly as a set of discrete contact and failure events. In this way it becomes possible to parallelize the problem, so that a very large number of ice floes can be modeled. This approach is called the Ice Event Mechanics Modeling (IEMM) method which builds a system solution from a large set of discrete events occurring between a large set of discrete objects. The simulator is developed using the NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA). This paper also describes the execution of experiments to evaluate the performance of the simulator and to validate the numerical modeling of ship operations in pack ice. Our results show speed up of 11 times, reducing simulation time for a large ice field (9,801 floes) from over 2 hours to about 12 minutes.