Conditions of Safe Ship Operation in Seaports – Optimization of Port Waterway Parameters

A seaport is presented in this article as a system composed of various types of waterways. The author has defined relationships between port waterway system elements and conditions of safe operation of ships in port. Relationships were determined between the conditions of safe operation of ships and the parameters of the following port waterways: anchorage, fairways (approach and inner channels, port entrances), turning area and port basin. The identified relationships between port waterway system and conditions of safe ship operation provided a basis for formulating the objective function of waterway parameter optimization during port design. In practice, these relations were used to determine the parameters of the Outer Container Terminal being built in Świnoujście, where two optimization problems were to be solved:

• The optimization of approach channel parameters,

• The optimization of parameters of the port entrance, turning area and port basin.

The Outer Container Terminal in Świnoujście is expected to handle ocean-going ships with a length overall L_o = 400 m, and its projected capacity is estimated at 1.5 million TEU per year, a figure that can be doubled in the future.