Reliability of Search and Rescue Action

The Impact of the Improved Search Object Detection on the SAR Action Success Probability in Maritime Transport

“…The reliability of SAR action (1) is a property of the system that indicates whether the action proceeds correctly for the required time (τ p ), less than the survival time (Sp t ), in the particular hydro-meteorological conditions, and is ended with finding and saving the rescuers [1,15,17].…”

“…where: R SAR (t) is the reliability of the search and rescue operation system, τ p is SAR operation time without a failure, Sp t is the survival time of search objects (survivors). The most important of them are the characteristics of searched object motions, mainly the speed relative to water, i.e., leeway (wind drift), enabling the determination of its current position to be dependent on the weather conditions and local surface currents [1,[12][13][14][15][16].…”

“…The main characteristic of the life raft enabling the determination of its most probable position (the reference position P 0 ) and size of search area (A 0 ) is leeway. The leeway functions of life rafts in relation to wind speed ( Figure 3) have been the subject of extensive research [1,10,[12][13][14][15][16]18,19] and are used in models for determining the search area.…”

“…The main purpose of the rescue operation at sea is to find and save people in emergency in the shortest possible time [1,2]. A man in emergency or missing floating unit with people on board are defined as the search objects.…”

“…The minimum requirements for the technical and operational characteristics of a pneumatic life raft are contained in the LSA code [8]. The progress in the construction of life rafts tends towards improvement of their detectability and better protection of survivors against the impact of harsh marine environment and hypothermia [1,9,10]; however, the economic criteria applied by shipowners when purchasing ship equipment results in innovations being slowly introduced to the market, often after the technical and operational requirements contained in the regulations have changed.…”