Maritime operational risk management using dynamic barriers

ABSTRACT

The safe operation of any vessel is challenged by the constraints posed through design, proper maintenance and operation of the available safety barriers ensuring their effectiveness. This requires a direct linkage between barrier performance and operational risk management accounting for barrier degradation and ensuing corrective actions. This paper demonstrates a comprehensive approach to Dynamic Barrier Management, by illustrating how barrier performance information and their respective functions is (a) collated, (b) aggregated through parametric models for identifying barrier relative importance, function criticality and in defining a set of key safety indicators, and (c) is intuitively visualised for providing real-time guidance to crew and shoreside management. The approach is demonstrated by considering watertight doors as Dynamic Barriers preventing excessive transient- and progressive-flooding on a cruise vessel during operation. It is further discussed how these methods can be generalised into a framework, enabling operational risk management and subsequent decision support.

KEYWORDS:

• Dynamic barrier management
• maritime operational risk
• feedback-loop
• sensor data
• real-time response

Acknowledgements

The opinions expressed are those of the authors and should not be construed to represent the views of the Norwegian Research Council, SEAMAN partnership, DNV GL AS, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., or the University of Strathclyde.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 $s_i:$ probability of surviving a given flooding scenario i.

Additional information

Funding

The work reported in this paper has been carried out under the SEAMAN project, Project No. 269467, with partial funding from the Norwegian Research Council (Norges Forskningsråd).