Moored ships often experience berthing problems due to water level variations generated by passage of other vessels. These berthing problems include line breakage and cargo spillage, both of which can be hazardous to humans and the environment. While passing ships create a range of effects including waves, drawdown, return velocity, and surge, the long-period water level drawdown is the most likely cause of significant movement of moored ships. These long-period waves and their reflection off various structures near docking facilities are complex in nature and beyond some of the simple harmonic forcing functions commonly employed in mooring algorithms. Solutions to these berthing problems include speed restriction of passing vessels, alternate mooring line arrangements, and structural changes to existing docks or design changes to proposed docks. Evaluation of the various solutions to berthing problems requires sophisticated tools to deal with the wide range of channel shapes, dock configurations, and adjacent structures. Numerical models with moving ships are being used to address the long-period water level variations in deep-draft ship channels for purposes of evaluating bank erosion as well as safety at recreational beach areas. These same tools can be used to compute the complex water level variations near problem berthing areas and to evaluate solutions. Example applications of the numerical models are presented.
Moored Ships: Determining Water Level Variations that Cause Berthing Problems
Ports Conference 2004 ; 2004 ; Houston, Texas, United States
Ports 2004 ; 1-10
2004-05-13
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Berthing manoeuvres of large ships
Engineering Index Backfile | 1968
|Deep Learning Based Moored Ship Movement Prediction to Determine Berthing Position
Elsevier | 2025
|The added mass of berthing ships
TIBKAT | 1981
|Moored ships as oscillating systems
Tema Archive | 1983
|