Predicting future catch rates with Olfish-2007

Fishing Consultant

According to Olrac, the Fishing Consultant can predict the future catch rates of a particular species for specified fishing areas and environmental conditions. The consultant uses catch rate, and any other information that is available about the conditions in which each recorded catch occurred, to produce a density distribution, indicating which areas are most likely to have the densest population of fish. A mathematical prediction model is trained on the historical data of catch and all recorded environmental factors. The trained model can then predict future catch rates under conditions specified by the user. The predictive accuracy of the model depends on the quality and quantity of data available in the database. The predicted catch rates can be visualised on a GIS component that provides a colour-coded predicted catch rate grid of each fishing area specified by the user.

Fleet Activity Optimiser

The Fleet Activity Optimiser is a utility designed be used by a fleet manager to set up vessel operating schedules. These schedules indicate which vessels should optimally be fishing when, where and for how long. There is always more than one possible operating schedule for each fleet of vessels. The Fleet Manager uses an optimisation algorithm to determine a quantitative measure of how effective different schedules are in terms of catch demand, cost efficiency, time and resource management.

A list of feasible operating schedules is provided based on the input parameter values. The efficiency of each schedule is indicated by the estimated catch of the specified species and the cost of the operation given a user-defined planning horizon. The user of the Fleet Activity Optimiser utility has the option of selecting one of the proposed operating schedules, or to create one manually.