Risk Management For Ferry Transportation Based On Navigation Safety Data

Ferries are operated over a relatively short distance,provide transportation services and form an indispensable part of the public transportation system of many archipelagic nations like Indonesia and river delta nations like Bangladesh.However,ferry transportation is vulnerable to hazardous weather,machinery failures and human errors.Because of the large number of passengers transported,ferry transportation involves the possibility of major accidents with a large number of casualties.Thus,it is of great importance to implement safety controls to protect offshore ferry transportation from fatal accidents and improve ferry safety.With the development of information and communication technology,data have underlain the risk management of water transportation.Focusing on ferry safety related data,this dissertation divided them into two types: accident data and status data,and conducted deep research to improve the risk management approach of ferry transportation.After an extensive exploration of numerous international and national accident databases,this dissertation developed a dedicated ferry safety database using relational database technology to cope with the problems about collection and maintenance of ferry safety data and unify their storage format.Afterwards,major ferry accidents from 2000 collected by the Worldwide Ferry Safety Association were imported into the database to conduct the characteristics analysis,including spatial analysis,event analysis and causal analysis,and recognize the common safety risk factors.And then,by referring to historical accident rules and expert opinions,this dissertation tried to tease out the relationship between these risk factors and the ferry safety status.In light of the problem of vagueness,uncertainty and inadequacy of data surrounding safety risk assessment.These factors were integrated into a novel risk assessment framework based on fuzzy logic theory to quantitatively assess the risk of ferry operations.This real-time,numerical and visible approach of risk assessment is attractive in that marine authorities can intuitively get knowledge of the dynamic safety status of underway ferries in the coastal monitoring area with a dynamic ferry safety index and implement proactive risk management.This dissertation is based on navigation safety data to improve the risk management of ferry transportation,from both the reactive accident analysis and the proactive risk analysis.Causal mechanisms derived from accident analysis can guide the risk analysis,and risk analysis can effectively supplement the risk analysis.Findings of this research have certain reference value for marine authorities to strengthen risk management of ferry transportation.