In the maritime industry, risk analyses have been used to prevent accidents and provide decision support for decades. A need for dynamic probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) for the maritime accident evolution mechanism research has been identified. Such methods should combine the dynamic event sequence generation and conventional PRA together to form an autonomous accident simulator.

This paper proposes a maritime Accident Dynamic Simulator (maritime-ADS) method from one ship’s perspective of ship collision accident. The maritime-ADS model is built based on discrete dynamic event trees (D-DET) to generate the time-dependent ship collision accident scenarios. According to the characteristics of maritime activities, such as high freedom of participation, the big influence of the environment, and the high uncertainty, the maritime-ADS method is modified, and the analyzed ship collision scenario is reasonably simplified. Both crews’ decision-making process and ship manoeuvre are fully discretized to generate new branches of the D-DET. Firstly, arrange the various events in the course of a ship collision based on a logical order. For example, it is found that the risk must be before the collision avoidance decision. The logical sequence of events becomes the basic framework of D-DET. On this basis, consider the difference in event results when the same event occurs at different time nodes. The environment in which a ship operates is a complex system in which the natural environment, ship mechanical systems, and people interact with each other. Therefore, D-DET needs to be associated with the physical environment model, ship hydrodynamic model, and human factor reliability model. All modules provide system timing and basic framework by D-DET, and other functional modules provide basic probability of event occurrence. Finally, a complete maritime accident probability simulation system is formed.

The interactions between encountered ships are modelled with an information transfer model to form the uncertainties between two ships.  The maritime-ADS consists of physical simulation engine, crew response and interaction model, reliability model of the system hardware, functional model of human-system interfaces and event sequence controlling model.  The maritime-ADS starts with a pre-set initiating event under a specific situation. Event branches are discretely generated based on probable alternative state changes of operator response or system evolution. The output probability of an end state can be calculated in the same way with the conventional event tree after the whole scenario completed. At the end of the paper, an accident case study is used to verify the efficiency of the ADS.


On the Use of the Accident Dynamic Simulator Method in Ship Collision Accident Analysis

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

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