Designing non-transport vessels for long service lives is complicated by evolving market conditions, operational demands, and stakeholder expectations. By applying Epoch-Era Analysis, this work demonstrates how future uncertainty can be incorporated into early-stage design decisions, helping designers evaluate changeability, adaptability, and long-term value rather than optimising solely for immediate requirements.

As CFD emerges as a powerful tool for analysing ship manoeuvring in restricted waters, it is providing new insights into the complex hydrodynamic interactions between vessels, rudders, and channel boundaries. Industry discussion supports the potential of numerical methods to improve understanding of bank effects, while highlighting the importance of incorporating factors such as propeller action, shallow-water conditions, free-surface effects, and experimental validation to ensure reliable application in navigational safety and ship-handling practice.

As coastal communities face increasing exposure to storm impacts and extreme sea states, accurately predicting wave set-up is becoming essential for reliable hazard assessment and coastal infrastructure design. By developing a new framework for estimating wave set-up under random wave conditions, this research highlights the significant influence of wave-spectrum characteristics on coastal water levels and demonstrates the practical application of the method using real-world measurements from diverse coastal environments.

Understanding when water should be considered “shallow” is becoming increasingly important as vessel efficiency, safety, and environmental performance come under greater scrutiny. By examining a broad range of hydrodynamic indicators, this research challenges the traditional reliance on depth alone and proposes a more comprehensive framework for characterising shallow-water effects, supporting improved vessel operations, route planning, and wash management.

As offshore wind development accelerates across European waters, the installation of increasingly large foundation structures is presenting new geotechnical and construction challenges. Alternative installation technologies are therefore gaining attention, with trench cutter methods offering a potential solution for sites where conventional pile driving is constrained by hard ground conditions, helping to improve the reliability and efficiency of offshore wind farm construction.

As innovative multi-hull concepts continue to emerge, designers are increasingly seeking rapid and reliable methods to evaluate performance during the earliest design stages. By applying artificial neural network techniques to resistance prediction, this study demonstrates how data-driven models can accelerate the preliminary design of Tri-SWACH vessels, offering a promising alternative to more time-consuming experimental and computational approaches.

As ships age in service, material degradation can progressively erode structural strength, even when the loss of mechanical properties appears relatively modest. By examining the long-term reduction in the yield and tensile strength of high-tensile shipbuilding steel, this study demonstrates how ageing and corrosion-related deterioration can significantly increase the probability of hull girder failure, underscoring the importance of incorporating material degradation into structural integrity assessments, maintenance planning, and lifecycle risk management.