Decision Support Tools for Oil Spill Control

 The main objective of this project was to develop a complete suite of functions regarding the monitoring, confrontation and consequent assessment of oil spill impact in Greek seas. In effect this project focused on the preservation of a clean marine and littoral environment and provided for the software to assess the situation and support all necessary decisions.

The main result from the OilSpill Control Program® was a balanced combination of a do-nothing and a do-optimum model. The counter pollution possibilities that it provided to the potential end user could not be considered trivial and easy obtained at the time of the development of this software package; e.g. it could select and examine specific processes of the weathering of the spilled oil, it could visualize the results from the advection model of the spill, it was able to assess its impact, it had the capability to display and propose the optimum counter pollution strategy (based on the time criterion, or otherwise stated as the coverage criterion) in order to achieve the best possible results etc.

Indicatively, the OilSpill Control Program® consisted from the following major functions:

•    A zoom-able complete map of Greece (hence an enhanced GIS system was integrated in the software package so as to produce impressive visualization capabilities at the time of the development of the program);
•    All the necessary inputs to pin down the initial whereabouts of the spill;
•    The animation (time projection) of the course of the spill (in a predefined time domain);
•   The presentation of all the sensitive areas (major ports, touristic and archaeological sites etc) of Greece that could be under danger (imminent or not) from the examined spill – with supplementary information about each of the aforementioned areas from the existing/loaded data banks;
•    The presentation of all the special info about the fate of the oil spill (including possible area covered by the spill, thickness of the spill, evaporated volume of oil etc);
•    The deployment of the existing network of counter pollution bases with all the necessary stock information for each one of them;
•   The presentation of the valid tanker routes that cross the Hellenic seas;
•   The oil confrontation possibilities that are identified for the examined spill;
•   The estimation of the fine that the responsible party of the oil spillage is obliged to pay to the Hellenic Ministry of Mercantile Marine (Y.E.N.).

The OilSpill Control Program® was a two year project (1995-1997) sponsored by the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT). The Laboratory for Maritime Transport NTUA was the sole partner of this project.