The prevention of marine accidents has been a major topic in marine society for long time and various safety policies and measures have been developed and applied to prevent those accidents. In spite of these efforts, however significant marine accidents have taken place intermittently.
During the course, hardware factors such as technology of ship building have been progressed significantly but software factors such as ship management including ship's crew have not. Ship is being operated under a highly dynamic environment and many factors are related with ship's collision and those factors are interacting. So the analysis on ship's collision causes are very important to prepare measures which will ensure the safety.
This study analysed, the cause of marine accidents using the marine accidents data over the past 10 years(1991-2000), which is compiled by Korea Marine Accidents Inquiry Agency. The analysis confirmed that 'ship's collision' is occurred most frequently and the cause is closely related with human factor.
The main purpose of this study is to analyse human factor. The structure of human factor is analysed by the questionnaire methodology. Marine experts were surveyed based on major elements that were extracted from the human factor affecting to ship's collision. Then, the structure analysis of ship's collision cause using Fuzzy Structural Modeling is performed. FSM(Fuzzy Structural Modeling) has been widely adopted in modeling a dynamic system which is composed of human factors.
The analysis shows that, the most important human factor related to the ship's collision is 'lookout negligence'. The other but less important factors are 'violation of navigation rules', 'inappropriate ship's speed', 'non-display of the navigation lights and shapes', 'non-execution of signals', 'sleepiness', 'inappropriate supervision' and 'inappropriate report and take over for duty officer's watch keeping', respectively.
This structure model could be used in understanding and verifying the procedure of real ship's collision. Furthermore it could be used as the model to prevent ship's collision and reduce marine accidents.