ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen a great deal of innovation in all areas of the maritime sector including that of vessel mooring systems, though on a smaller scale in this than in some other areas, the conventional system still being used today in most ports. However, since 1914, research has been carried out into the possibility of developing alternative mooring systems (Hadcroft & Montgomery 2005), using devices other than the conventional ones. The research carried out over the last 100 years has led to an automatic vacuum-based mooring system (Villa 2014) which has been implanted in more than 20 ports worldwide, and whose use seems to be on the rise. It is a hydraulic mooring system by suckers. The viability of the system to be implanted in a port has to be assessed taking into account both technical factors (prevailing winds, currents, types of vessel, etc.) and economic ones (investment, operating costs, traffic flows, etc.) (Díaz 2016). The aim of this work is to determine the viability of the implantation of the system in a commercial port. The technical viability will be analyzed using a real-time maneuver simulator, and thus can be applied to any port for which this information is available or whose activity can be reproduced in the simulator. The economic viability will be analyzed starting from the determination of the traffic threshold which would make the investment profitable and the traffic flows of the selected port. The aim is to establish a general procedure and then apply it to the Port of Santander.
