A novel risk assessment process: Application to an autonomous inland waterways ship

Abstract

Effectively addressing safety, security and cyber-security challenges is quintessential for progressing the development of next generation maritime autonomous shipping. This study aims at developing a novel hybrid, semi-structured process for the hazardous scenarios identification and ranking. This method integrates the operational and functional hazard identification approaches, whilst considering the safety, security and cybersecurity hazards. This method is applied to comprehensively assess the safety of an autonomous inland waterways ship at a preliminary design phase. The hazardous scenarios are identified and ranked by a number of experts participating in a series of sessions. The identified hazards risk is estimated considering the frequency and severity indices, whereas their uncertainty is estimated by employing the standard deviations in these two indices among the experts ranking results. Epistemic uncertainty is also considered during ranking. Risk control measures are proposed to de-risk the critical hazards. The results reveal that the most critical hazards from the safety, security and cybersecurity perspectives pertain to the situation awareness, remote control and propulsion functions. Based on the derived results, design enhancements along with high-level testing scenarios for the investigated autonomous ship are also proposed.

Maritime accidents in the Yangtze River: A time series analysis for 2011–2020

“…In the research of inland water traffic safety, using the Yangtze River as a case study, Zhang et al (2014) proposed an accident data-based method to evaluate the risk of congestion on inland waterways. At the early design stage, Bolbot et al (2021) merged the operational and functional hazard identification methodologies to thoroughly evaluate an autonomous inland waterways ship's safety. Using fault tree analysis as a method, Awal et al (2014) published a research on contact type accidents of inland water transport in Bangladesh.…”

Editorial for the special issue on the International Workshop on Autonomous System Safety (IWASS)

“…Bolbot et al 11 also address the challenges of autonomous ships with their hybrid, semi-structured process for hazardous scenarios' identification and ranking. The process focuses on hazards related during operation and functional execution related to safety, security, and cyber security.…”

Study on the Risk Model of the Intelligent Ship Navigation

“…Inland rivers, coasts, and oceans are the three major scenarios for ship navigation. The three scenarios have significantly different requirements for different factors, modes, and spaces, in terms of channel conditions, structures, communication conditions, and personnel [33,34], so they were used as boundary conditions for the analysis of risk evolution.…”