Socio-economic cost savings through risk assessment of ship collisions with transport infrastructure

Important results from the project

The purpose of this project is to develop a new risk analysis methods for ship collisions against maritime transport infrastructure, where local data from the fairways are taken into account through the use of Big Data. The new risk analysis methods can also be used in other infrastructure projects, e.g. in the development of seaside houses and the design of offshore wind turbines. The project´s goal is that the new developed approach to conducting risk analyzes for ship collisions contributes to socio-economic savings.

Expected long term effects

The project has reached the set goals and a new model for analyzing ship-bridge collisions has been developed. In connection with this, have 3 methods for quantifying "failure events" based on the ships´ GPS positions (AIS data). In addition to this model, is the normal behavior studied in the project and a new "ship domain" has been quantified. This "ship domain" are used to make ship-ship collision calculations, which is needed in connection with fairway changes. Within the framework of the project, 2 journal articles, 1 conference article and 1 licentiate thesis have been published.

Approach and implementation

The first journal article studied normal behavior and defined the normal meeting distance at sea in the so-called ship domian. This ship domain was later used in a conference article where near-misses were studied. Furthermore, the knowledge about normal / abnormal behavior was used in the second journal article where the probability of ship-bridge collisions was studied. The article studied an area around the Great Belt Bridge (Denmark), where the method was verified with the probability of groundings. The probability of bridge collisions was estimated to 0.007 per year.