Investigation of the Influences of Human Error Factor in Maritime Transportation

Abstract

Marine transport has a vital role in people and cargo transport across the world, where, more than 90% of the world’s cargo transports by merchant ships. Marine transport industry is considered one of the huge and high-risk industries. This clarify why safety is one of the imperatives of the maritime industry and which highly affect the success and efficient exist of this industry. Therefore, reducing the associate risks and improving maritime safety are of the essential requirements for main marine transport industry.

There are many parameters contributing into improving maritime safety and reducing the associate risks of accidents. Efforts are presented and attention is given by shipping industry toward that. This is mainly by focusing in safety regulations, improving ship’s structural design and construction methodologies and techniques and by improving ship’s systems operation and reliability. Accordingly, improvements in ship’s hull design, building processes and methodologies; utilization of advanced technologies and equipment and improving ships legislation and regulations have been clearly noticed. Instead of that, the maritime casualty rate and accidents are still high. This is because ship structure and system reliability are a relatively small part of the safety equation. Where, ship safety is highly affected by human actions as the majority of maritime accidents are consequences of human error. Meanwhile, human factors have the largest share in marine accidents, where, more than 80% of marine accidents have been caused by human error. Therefore, human error is one of the most important issues concerning global maritime communities and it is one of the important factors in the assessment of maritime accidents.

Several studies are conducted to assess the contribution of human factors in maritime accidents in order to reduce the overall number of marine accidents. The study of human behavior in the field of marine activities is challenging task due to the difficulties, expenses, and time-consuming factors. Moreover, there is lack of information on the role of human in marine accidents.

This study aiming at presenting the effect of human errors in the overall maritime safety. This is through analyzing 98 of ships accidents happened during 2014-2017 to investigate the main parameters contributing in these accidents, identify human error related causes and estimate the overall contribution of the human error causes to the occurrence of these accidents. The results of the analysis indicated that 75% of the causes of the registered accidents were due to human error.

In order to provide details about the contribution of the human error to the overall ship accidents causes, analysis to the reported accidents by European Marine Casualty Information Platform from 2011-2017 for cargo ships, fishing vessels, passenger ships and service ships. The results of survey indicated high contribution of human error to the causes of ships accidents, where it represents: • 62.2% of the total of 156 accidental events analyzed of service ships • 60.8% of the total of 781 accidental events analyzed of cargo ships • 54.4% of the total of 338 accidental events analyzed of fishing vessels • 51.4% of the total of 319 accidental events analyzed of passenger ships Moreover, a detailed analysis of a collision case study between Kuwaiti oil tanker “Kaifan” and cargo ship “Unison Star” collided at Chittagong - Bangladesh anchorage area (2017). The analysis of the collision case study conducted using step-by-step events evaluation technique and a systematic process for accident investigation based on comprehensive and multi linear description of events sequences using STEP methodology to investigate rout causes of the collision and identify the contribution of human error causes. The results of investigation clearly prove the contribution of human error as a main factor led to collision.

In addition, this thesis investigates collision avoidance procedures, which use a dedicated negotiation and communication system to optimize locally found trajectories according to a global performance measure. This is by introducing, discussing and analyzing of three ship collisions avoidance algorithms based on multiple‐ship situations, which are the Distributed Local Search Algorithm (DLSA), the Distributed Tabu Search Algorithm (DTSA) and the Distributed Stochastic Search Algorithm (DSSA) Furthermore, in experimental results, compared to DLSA and DTSA, DSSA produced good results, such as decreasing the number of messages. Therefore, DSSA enables ships to exchange significantly fewer messages than DLSA and DTSA then I developed a mathematical algorithm for the risk assessment and collision avoidance and calculating collision risk index and present a criteria to be applied and present the MATLAB code which used to calculate collision risk index.

Finally, the thesis ended by detailed conclusions, remarks and recommendations to improve maritime safety and improving human factor by eliminating the concerned associated errors.