Regularity Study On The Design Of Traffic Separation Schemes

Traffic separation scheme is the main style and the commonest one of ship’s routeing. From the first modern traffic separation scheme was established in Dover Strait in1967,so far more than180traffic separation schemes have been adopted by International Maritime Organization(IMO). Traffic separation schemes have played an active role in ensuring the safety of navigation, improving the navigation environment, enhancing the efficiency of marine traffic, protecting the ocean environment and promoting the socio-economic development.General Provisions on Ship’s Routeing of IMO has given fundamental direction and advice to the design of traffic separation schemes. We need to unearth the internal rules in designing current traffic separation schemes under the direction of these provisions. The paper studied more than180cases of traffic separation schemes adopted by IMO in detail. The detailed statistics mainly consists of technical elements of traffic separation schemes such as traffic lanes’length, the width, the turning points and the distance to the shore. It also consists of some establishment methods such as how to separate the traffic flow, how to connect two traffic lanes or how to achieve optimization grouping when using different routeing measures. Considering the difference of the traffic environment and the characteristics of the traffic flow in different waters, the paper divided the establishing areas into five groups. They are inshore waters, narrow channels, marine forelands, outport or harbor and others. Through analyzing the statistic data, we can get the characteristics of the technical elements in different groups of waters. On this base, we can make use of the methods cluster analysis and grey correlation to find out the relationship among the elements and the traffic volume, and to discover the rules how the elements influence the traffic volume.The paper unearthed some rules about traffic separation schemes design and planning, which must have a great reference significance to the design, the establishment and the evaluation of traffic separation schemes.