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Sea Traffic Management – Measuring Maritime Safety

Sea Traffic Management – Measuring Maritime Safety

Published: February 01, 2017

YOU can improve future maritime safety by adding your expertise to the Maritime Safety Index survey. In it, you will judge different traffic situations that may occur at sea.

Safe transport of goods by sea is essential for society and thus various measures are taken to improve maritime safety, for example through the implementation of traffic separation schemes, radar surveillance and traffic management concepts such as STM. But how can maritime safety be measured to determine the effects of those implementations?

A group within the STM project, consisting of Fredrik Olindersson (Chalmers), Tina Scheidweiler, Wilko Bruhn (both Fraunhofer CML), and Axel Andersson (SSPA) was formed to develop a real-time Maritime Safety Index. Based on maritime expert judgement, ship traffic is assessed in terms of safe navigation. These experts have been identified as being either active or retired navigators, pilots, lecturers and simulator instructors. In order to capture their assessment of what is considered to be “safe”, multiple various traffic situations – both in open and constrained Waters – are graphically presented in an online survey. The respondents appraise each traffic situation from the perspective of their identified “own ship” on a scale from 1 to 10.

With the feedback from the survey, the index is then developed using fuzzy logic modelling and further validated in different ship-handling simulator scenarios by maritime traffic experts. Numerical data from the simulator is used as an input to assess the present traffic situation from the perspective of a specific ship and to present a comprehensive index.

In the STM project, simulations within the European Maritime Simulator Network (EMSN) are scheduled to start during autumn 2017, with exercise scenarios consisting of 25-30 manned ships navigating in a ship-handling simulation environment. Exercises will include scenarios such as complex traffic situations with and without the use of the envisaged STM tools. The numerical model based on the expert assessment – combined with human factor analysis – will then be used in the evaluation of the simulations from an operational safety perspective.

The survey is available online. It is rather straightforward, self-explanatory and takes about 20 to 30 minutes.

The survey can be found here

A more detailed description of the work concerning the numerical Maritime Safety Index will be presented at the TransNav 2017 Conference in Gdynia.

Authors: Reto Weber, Fredrik Olindersson, Axel Andersson, Wilko Bruhn and Tina Scheidweiler

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