Effective utilization of service vessels in fish farming: Fleet design considering the characteristics of the locations

Abstract

Effective utilization of service vessels in sea-based fish farming requires that the vessels are suited to the operating environments at the fish farms. This paper presents a methodology for assessing service vessel fleet performance when serving a network of farms with different metocean conditions. Fleet performance is defined as the ability to perform operations requested by the fish farms, in due time. An optimization for simulation approach is employed, implementing a routing and scheduling heuristic developed for aquaculture service vessels. A case study was performed assessing the performance of two different fleets serving a set of 21 fish farms. The variation in local metocean conditions between the farms, and how weather changes in time, challenges the operability of the aquaculture infrastructure and the effective routing and scheduling of the vessels. Hence, the results show that proper fleet composition in this context improves fleet performance. Fleet performance is substantially higher when fleet composition, routing, and scheduling is based on the specific weather conditions.