Bulk chemical carrier information system - American Bureau of Shipping (ABS)

Description

A tool for use when certifying vessels to carry bulk controlled chemicals. Screen shot 1

Background

ABS is a not-for-profit corporation which develops and verifies standards for the design, construction and operational maintenance of marine-related facilities.

UniTech built a bespoke piece of software to assist ABS users who produce certificates for vessels carrying bulk solid chemicals. Prior to the development of the software, this was a manual process.

Requirements

The software was required so that vessels carrying chemicals in bulk could be easily assesed and certified according to the regulations in place for the carriage of bulk chemicals. Requirements were to:

  • Design and build a database to store information on bulk solid checmicals
  • Develop software which applied the rules as stated in the following regulations
    • SOLAS - International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) Regulation II-2/19.3
    • BC code - IMO document MSC 79/23/add.4 Annex 40 (Code of Safe Practice for Solid Bulk Cargoes or BC Code)

screen shot 2Benefits experienced

  • Reduction of the time necessary to certify a vessel
  • Reduction of current risk involved in manually certifying a vessel
  • Ability to save vessel details for annual re-certification (time-saving benefit)
  • Transfer of expert knowledge to the software reducing knowledge a user requires
  • Automatic synchronisation with database

Technology and approach

BCCIS was implemented as a .Net 2.0 Windows Forms smart client. A local SQL Server CE 3.5 database was used as a lightweight offline data storage and querying engine. This was synchronised with a central SQL Server 2005 database using Remote Data Access.

The client application included administration forms which allowed privileged users to update central information via a .Net Web Service. Various certification reports were constructed using SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services and displayed using the Windows Forms Report Viewer.