IJME 284

Paper title: Survivability of Ships at Sea: A Proposed Model to Account for Human Factors in a Safety-Critical System

Authors

V Rumawas and B E Asbjørnslett, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

Summary 

Most serious accidents at sea are caused by minor incidents that escalated into an uncontrolled situation. This study is aiming to develop a model to investigate the likelihood of fatal accidents, given that a critical incident has already occurred. The focus of the study is on human behaviour, adopting a hardware reliability perspective. The vessel is considered as a safety-critical system to be protected by several barriers. The crew role is modelled as active barriers and distinguishing between different functions: perception, decision and action. A Markov approach is proposed to model different situations on the vessel.  A mathematical model to estimate the probability of failure in an emergency situation is formulated. A new parameter is defined for the survivability of a vessel, given that a critical incident has taken place. The methods were applied to examine ship-platform collisions cases and the results show strong benefits for diagnosing and evaluating accidents from a human factors perspective as well as for training purposes.

Reference

Transactions RINA, Vol 156, Part A2, International Journal Maritime Engineering, Apr-Jun 2014 

DOI Number

DOI No: 10.3940/rina.ijme.2014.a2.284

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