Safety and environment risk and reliability model for inland waterway collision accident frequency

Abstract

Marine vessel collisions cover the largest part of accidents scenario in waterways. Waterways accidents expose vessel owners and operators, as well as the public to risk. They attract possibility of losses such as vessel cargo damage, injuries, loss of life, environmental damage, and obstruction of waterways. Collision risk is a product of the probability of the physical event its occurrence as well as losses of various nature including economic losses. Environmental problem and need for system reliability call for innovative methods and tools to assess and analyze extreme operational, accidental and catastrophic scenarios as well as accounting for the human element, and integrate these into a design environments part of design objectives. This paper discusses modeling of waterways collision risk frequency in waterways. The analysis consider mainly the waterways dimensions and other related variables of risk factors like operator skill, vessel characteristics, traffic characteristics, topographic, environmental difficulty of the transit, and quality of operator's information in transit which are required for decision support related to efficient, reliable and sustainable waterways developments. The probability per year predicted is considered acceptable in maritime and offshore industry, but for a channel using less number of expected traffic, it could be considered high. Providing safety facilities like traffic separation, vessel traffic management could restore maximize sustainable use of the channel.