Engineering studies ship's traffic flow

With a largely transient population of about 2,000, it's a small city with some unique traffic-flow problems.

In this case, the "city" is a cruise ship and most of the "traffic" is of the pedestrian variety. The challenges include moving large numbers of vacationers on and off the ship in a short time during boarding and debarkations. Another is serving buffet meals without long waits.

These and other special seaborne situations recently were examined by Wes Graham of Nettleton and Brian K. Smith of Belmont, both industrial engineering graduate students at Mississippi State. Both received bachelor's degrees at MSU.

Their pedestrian traffic-flow study was part of Ingalls Shipyard's bid to build two cruise ships for American Classic Voyages Inc. Recently, the Pascagoula-based industry received the contract to build ACV's largest-ever vessels.

Royce Bowden, an associate professor of industrial engineering and deputy director of the National Center for Intermodal Transportation, said the students were part of a worldwide team working on the proposal for Ingalls, which consistently is among Mississippi's largest employers.

"Ingalls entered into a partnership with marine engineering and design firms worldwide on all aspects of the proposal," he said. "For the passenger-flow study, they turned to MSU."

Though Bowden and assistant professor Richard Cassady directed the research, they gave project responsibility to the students.

After completing the project, the students were part of a select team that included the ship's designer and architect who made presentations to cruise line officials. "The confidence Ingalls showed by including our students in the executive presentation for the cruise ship project is an indication of the expertise and professionalism they exhibited," Bowden said.

Ingalls competed for the contract with two other U.S. ship builders-New Orleans-based Avondale and National Steel and Shipbuilding of San Diego. The 71,000-ton, 840-foot vessels will be the largest cruise ships ever built at an American shipyard and the first to be built in this country in more than 40 years.

The first vessel is expected to begin service in the Hawaiian Islands in late 2002.

"We are proud that our industrial engineering students played such an important role in bringing a project with such economic benefits to our state," Cassady said.