Study On The Safety Of Vessel Traffic In The Yangtze River

As the 1st largest river in China and 3rd in the world, the Yangtze River is a grand logistical channel, crossing the country from west to east. The safety states of traffic in the River not only profile the government's ability of risk management involved with waterborne transportation, but also influence the economic development and social stability. Due to lack of investment, backward development, and great deviations of environments, ships and pilots, it has been a challenging job to do researches and practice in this field, and thereby empirical approaches are still deeply relied for probing the mechanism of traffic safety. Aiming to change the unfavorable situation, this paper proposed to apply new theories and techniques throughout the associated researches to boost the advance of waterborne transportation there. In addition, the research achievements generalized will be valuable for other water areas.The paper presents the scope and framework of traffic safety in the Yangtze River, which derived from the connotation and extension of vessel traffic safety. After reviewed the state of the art of the associated researches, the author focused on such aspects as risk assessment, safety support system, safety manage and culture, and proposed to apply information science, computer technology, ship maneuverability and quality ship management to practice and theoretical researches.To develop the databased risk assessment and quantitative analysis instead of qualitative one, the paper present that information embodied in traffic incidents is multi-dimension data set from the viewpoint of information science. For the convenience and efficiency of analysis under different dimensions, the data warehouse of vessel traffic incidents was developed, based on the technique of data warehouse. In order to recognize the patterns of incidents and extract the features of causes, multi-models combined data mining technique was developed.Ship is in the center of traffic control. Ship's maneuverability is the basis when developing and utilizing the traffic safety support system in the River. The activity to pilot a ship or ship's real movement in the River is the ship's behavior under the interaction of Man-Ship Maneuverability-Environment. Based on MMGmodel, a universal ship maneuvering mathematical model was developed, which included wet-jetted catamaran and took environment (wind, current, wave, shallow water) effects into consideration. The traditional pilot experiences were quantified by fuzzy inference system (FIS) and an autopilot control model was developed. Integrated advanced computer programming methods, Electronic Chart and River Information System and OpenGL, a software platform for traffic risk analysis was developed, which can visualize ship maneuvering simulation at fast time or real time in the way of 2D or 3D.For safety management and safety culture, the framework of indicators, used to evaluate the quality ship and company in the River, was developed. Now, it has been applied by the Yangtze River Traffic Administration since 2004.