A new method for maritime traffic safety index appraisal

In maritime transportation, safety during vessel's navigation at sea depends on technical and human components of the ship-system and the marine environment. The danger to the ship, on board crew and the environment continually change during the entire ship voyage due to numerous unpredictable factors. This paper proposes a new method to assess the maritime traffic safety index of the marine vessel during its journey at sea. The technology recognized as Automatic Identification System (AIS), made a compulsory fitting by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), for ships engaged in international voyages, is used to gather the information needed. This information is then transformed to obtain the various static and dynamic factor values affecting the maritime traffic safety index. Initially, identified factors are grouped under higher level factors to develop a hierarchical structure. Analytic hierarchy process is used to acquire the local weights of the factors at all the levels. Local weights are subsequently converted into normalized global weights for consideration at par. Traffic safety index of the vessel is then estimated using transformed factor values and the normalized global weights. The proposed method could be used in an online assessment of safety index and continual monitoring of variation in it. This would be helpful in the safety management of a marine vessel during its entire navigation. © 2011 IEEE.