Marine environment has been polluted and damaged by many sources such as industrial waste, natural seepage, oil spill and offshore production etc. Among them, oil spill from oil tankers is one of most harmful sources to marine lives as its input amount is huge at a limited area for short period. In Korea, the port of Yeosu is known to be very vulnerable to oil spill with large amount of petroleum transported across the harbour. In this regards, the author analyzed and reviewed marine environment and appropriate response to marine oil spill at this area. For these purposes, oceanographic and meteorologic features as well as regional characteristics of harbor facilities, shipping routes, marine traffic and fisheries were investigated, also traffic densities were analyzed in order to check marine accident probabilities making direct observations for 72 hours visual1y and by portable radar.

The production process of the compound-curved hull plates includes hull design, definition, fairing, modeling, lofting, cutting, and forming in sequence. Traditional fabrication methods and shop environment caused low level to productivity in medium and small sized shipyards. The most effective solution to solve those problems is to rationalize the layout of facilities. For the well-balanced development of domestic shipbuilding industry, it is urgently required to reduce the gap between modernized large sized shipyards and traditional small and medium sized shipyards in production technologies and efficiencies. For the efficient and accurate hull piece forming, all information from design to forming should be clarified and organized in a systematic manner. Thus, management of the information plays an important role in the computerized and automated of hull piece forming. The object of this paper is to survey the status of the field, to find out the feasibility and to introduce a draft of hull piece fabrication line for small and medium sized shipyards. The development of required system follows the object oriented technology to extend to simulation based system for carrying out physical product flow and facilities layout analysis. It is feasible to operate such a modernized facility for a group of small and medium shipyards who are unable to have each of their own facility because of its large amount of initial investment and insufficient work load.