Designing offshore fish cages using systems engineering principles

The human population reached 7 billion at the end of October 2011, accentuating the challenge to increase food production to meet the demand. Offshore mariculture, which does not depend on wild fish harvest, has the potential to become a primary food source to meet this demand. Despite an overall interest and justification in investments in offshore aquaculture, there are very few offshore cage designs suitable for use today. The goal of the current paper is to describe a research project that applied systems engineering principles to develop and document a set of requirements and identify the relevant technical components that are needed to design a sustainable offshore cage system. Requirements from the sector should be met by a robust environmentally friendly cage system ensuring the welfare of the fish and capable of producing a quality fish product demanded by the consumer. Future design work will build on the proposed preliminary architecture to satisfy these requirements. (C) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng