An advanced risk analysis approach for container port safety evaluation

Abstract

Risk analysis in seaports plays an increasingly important role in ensuring port operation reliability, maritime transportation safety and supply chain distribution resilience. However, the task is not straightforward given the challenges, including that port safety is affected by multiple factors related to design, installation, operation and maintenance and that traditional risk assessment methods such as quantitative risk analysis cannot sufficiently address uncertainty in failure data. This paper develops an advanced Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) approach through incorporating Fuzzy Rule-Based Bayesian Networks (FRBN) to evaluate the criticality of the hazardous events (HEs) in a container terminal. The rational use of the Degrees of Belief (DoB) in a fuzzy rule base (FRB) facilitates the implementation of the new method in Container Terminal Risk Evaluation (CTRE) in practice. Compared to conventional FMEA methods, the new approach integrates FRB and BN in a complementary manner, in which the former provides a realistic and flexible way to describe input failure information while the latter allows easy updating of risk estimation results and facilitates real-time safety evaluation and dynamic risk-based decision support in container terminals. The proposed approach can also be tailored for wider application in other engineering and management systems, especially when instant risk ranking is required by the stakeholders to measure, predict and improve their system safety and reliability performance.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to independent reviewers who provided useful feedback to bring this article to fruition. This study is partially funded by two EU projects (REFERENCE (314836) and ENRICH (612546) Marie Curie IRSES, 2013–2017) and by King Abdul-Aziz University.

Notes

1. DoB is a quantitative unit between 0 and 1 used to express the confidence level of an expert when making subjective evaluate.

2. The backgrounds and experience of the experts are described in Section 3.2.