Context analysis of Offshore Fish Farming

Abstract

The in-land and nearshore fish farming is facing capacity limitation and onshore push-out regulations. Huge technological innovations are rapidly evolving toward developing competitive Offshore fish farming. These technological innovations are mainly targeting to innovate new farming concepts that dynamically stable, reliable and compatible with offshore environmental loads and conditions. The dynamic operational behaviour of each farming concept is quite complicated. It is a combination of reinforcing behaviours (Loads, cage deformations, welfare issues, e.g. escaping, stress-related disease) and leveraging behaviours (Biofouling-cleaning, Deterioration-maintenance) and all influenced by fluctuating and harsh environmental loads and conditions. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the context of offshore fish farming and explore quantitative descriptions of its reinforcement and leveraging behaviours. The context analysis is a well-known method within systems engineering methodology to illustrate and extract critical interfaces. The context analysis is considered as the first step in building simulation model to quantify the impact of systems interfaces on the entire farming economics, i.e. income and cost.