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Fishing sector is one of the most dangerous worldwide. Accidents are usually related to stability failures that can be due to static or dynamic phenomena. Their main cause is the crew lack of training in stability matters, especially in small-medium sized fishing vessels. The vast majority of fishermen assess the risk level of their ship carrying out a subjective analysis, based on their previous experience. In order to reduce the number of stability-related accidents, onboard guidance systems were proposed in the last years as a tool that helps the skippers to evaluate the ship stability in an easy and understandable way. The authors of this work have proposed their own alternative, which consists on a simplified stability guidance software installed on a touchable-screen computer. In its initial version, this software relied in data manually introduced by the crew and only considered static stability for the evaluation of the vessel safety index. In the version presented in this paper, the authors have tried to solve the need for manual data applying a methodology for the real-time estimation of the roll natural frequency of the vessel. In addition to this, environmental conditions and the evaluation of dynamic stability vulnerabilities based on the IMO Second Generation of Intact Stability Criteria have also been included.

Fishing is a hazardous activity due to stability related accidents, caused many times by the crew lacking information related to the level of stability of the vessel. A possible solution is offered by stability assessment systems that can help the skipper to identify potential risks and support his decision making process.The metacentric height is a key parameter for vessel stability and its real-time monitoring may be beneficial for alerting the crew about changes in stability. The paper proposes the design of a novel stability monitoring system that automatically detects changes in metacentric height based on estimates of the roll natural frequency solely using the measured roll angle. The core of the monitoring system is a combined estimation-detection system that exploits methods in advanced signal processing and statistical change detection to properly address issues of robustness.

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