Selection of the optimum combination of responses for Wave Buoy Analogy - An approach based on local sensitivity analysis

One method to estimate the wave spectrum onboard ships is to use measured ship responses. In this method, known also as Wave Buoy Analogy, amongst various responses that are available from sensor measurements, a couple of responses (at least three) are usually utilized. Selec-tion of the best combination of ship responses is important. Optimally, this selection should not be implemented manually in onboard applications. Therefore, availability of an automatic response selection procedure would be a great advantage for decision support. In this paper, a local sensitivity analysis is applied to evaluate the importance of individual responses in sea state estimation. The sensitivity factor is defined by calculation of the partial derivatives of wave parameters with respect to the variance of individual responses.