Many researchers have studied vessel systems to enhance navigation safety at sea, or analysed the statistics of marine casualties of different flagged vessels as well as the fatalities and injuries in ferry accidents. However, little research has been devoted to port safety and especially navigation safety within Taiwanese territorial waters where over a 10-year period there have been 3428 marine accidents with 548 deaths and 524 vessels sunk. In this paper, we use the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) to analyse the marine accident records of each of Taiwan's commercial ports from 1992-2003. Then, after interviewing the port authority managers and marine specialists, we discover the concerns felt by these professionals about Taiwanese commercial ports. We provide suggestions to strengthen port navigation safety.

No abstract

No abstract

With the rapid development of automation techniques, the claw-poled stepping motors are widely used, especially in optical scanners. Most research on stepping motors has concentrated on electrical properties, but a few papers have reported on the performance in relation to the magnetic-field distribution. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of the shape of the stator tooth and to search for the optimal parameters using a magnetic-circuit simulation technique. Through numerical calculations, the optimal performance conditions can be obtained by varying the ratio between the two bases of the trapezoid teeth between 1∕5 and 1∕3, and varying the ratio between the heights of individual teeth in relation to the separation between the two yokes from 11∕15 to 13∕15.

The concentrated inspection campaign (CIC) is a derivative of the port state control (PSC) supplement, which is a fixed single series of deficiency inspections performed for three consecutive months at the end of each year. This study used grey relational analysis (GRA) and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) to analyze the data of 71,376 deficiency records with 496 deficiency codes and 21 ship types in the Paris MoU for the last three years so as to improve the existing focus inspection pattern, which uses only the most accumulated number of deficiency series of the previous year’s PSC inspection. It also combines the three-sigma rule to find the inspection items most likely to be found as deficient by the port state control officer (PFSO) of the member country and creates a new rolling CIC scheme with deficiency inspection data for the last three years, which can filter out the significant deficiency codes with high numbers of deficiency inspections and use them as a modified CIC. It can not only solve the existing CIC’s lack of thoroughness, but also avoid the problems of missing important inspection codes, missing substandard ships, and failing to meet the inspection consensus. The new CIC inspection mechanism created in this paper can indeed identify potential substandard ships more effectively and fill the inspection gap of the existing port state control.