Collision risk assessment in coastal waters

Collision risk assessment in coastal waters

Grossmann, Martin (TU Delft Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering)

Kana, Austin (graduation committee)
Hopman, Hans (mentor)
Hassel, Martin (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

2019-10-23

The amount of international shipped cargo grows steadily, and seas are exploited for seabed mining and energy production more than ever. As a result, there is an increase in traffic density and decrease in free navigational space, potentially causing a higher incidence of dangerous navigation situations that may lead to ship collisions. This thesis establishes a hypothesis that there are coastal areas where the risk of collision is unexplored and abnormally high and has not been analysed yet. Therefore, the thesis aims to develop a method suitable to assess the risk of collision in coastal waters. A thesis literature review primarily focuses on the current collision risk assessment methods, circumstances of collisions, and sources of navigational information for coastal waters. The literature review concludes that a promising and novel approach is to detect near-collision situations based on the data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS). The near-collision exists when a ship's safety domain is violated and, simultaneously, the ship performed a last-moment evasive manoeuvre, which is identified by an abnormal ship's rate of turn. Building on a previous basic version of the near-collision detection method and AIS data provided by Safetec Nordic AS, this thesis develops a collision risk assessing tool that significantly outperforms the original method. The performance of the designed method was evaluated using AIS data from the Vestfjorden area in Norwegian coast during 2013-2015. The case study shows that this approach effectively detects near-collision situations but identifies a considerable number of new false near-collisions. The details and spatial distribution of detected near-collisions provide valuable insight into navigational areas vulnerable to collisions, collision circumstances, and frequency of collisions.

risk assessment
Collision detection
Automatic Identification System
coastal areas
near-collision

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:30c436c1-7727-4068-9315-383c040ba6a0

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 Martin Grossmann