Statistical Analysis of Accidents and Review of Safety Level of Passenger Ships

Abstract

This paper deals with a statistical analysis of maritime accidents pertaining to passenger ships in worldwide operation and, ultimately, with the assessment of the current safety level of the particular ship type, assuming that the safety level may be defined as a societally acceptable level of risk. The basic risk contributors, namely the frequency of main accidents’ occurrence and related consequences, are herein quantified and assessed. The presented analysis, covering the last two decades (2000–2021), shows that there has been a considerable reduction in the frequency of serious accidents’ occurrence in the last decade, whereas associated consequences do not exhibit the same trend since the frequency of ship total losses and of fatalities has increased. However, fatality rates are, to a great extent, affected by accidents of ships not compliant with safety regulations. This study also confirmed that grounding and contact accidents dominate the statistics of passenger ships of all subtypes, whereas collision accidents only account for about 30% of the events potentially leading to flooding. This calls for an urgent reconsideration of present SOLAS damage stability regulations, in which the bottom and side collision events need to be reconsidered with priority as the prime contributors to the flooding risk of passenger ships.

Analysis of the Relationships between Factors Contributing to Marine Casualties

“…Many statistical studies on the factors causing accidents at sea are analysed according to only one criterion. A statistical analysis of the number of accidents and the frequency of factors for passenger ships is presented in [16]. The influence of the human factor on navigational accidents has been analysed using various methods in the work presented in [17].…”

A Review on Motion Prediction for Intelligent Ship Navigation

“…Predicting ship behavior through the prediction of the ship-navigation trajectory will effectively mitigate these navigation risks [3][4][5][6]. According to statistics from the International Maritime Organization (IMO), approximately 80-85% of accidents that occurred in the past two decades were attributed to human faults [7,8]. By implementing ship automation or assisted navigation systems, the probability of ship accidents can be effectively reduced.…”

Evacuation Simulation of a Passenger Ship Fire Based on a Modified Cellular Automaton

“…[ 38–40 ] When the existing cellular automaton models are used to simulate the fire evacuation of passenger ships, the simulation results deviate from the actual situation. [ 41 ]…”

“…[38][39][40] When the existing cellular automaton models are used to simulate the fire evacuation of passenger ships, the simulation results deviate from the actual situation. [41] To fully consider the effects of carbon monoxide (CO) concentration, temperature, and visibility on evacuees, this study proposes a method combining FDS simulation with the cellular automaton model. Fire data are imported into the modified cellular automaton by commutation so that fire data consistently affect pedestrian transfer probabilities.…”