Contribution of PSC Authorities to Ship Accident Prevention

Abstract

Historically, several maritime casualties have caused loss of lives or environmental disasters. World states are responsible to eliminate such disasters, along with the improvement and efficiency of goods transportation. To prevent similar cases, states have agreed to enforce international standards to oceangoing ships. For monitoring purposes, each state has empowered its Port State Control (PSC) to inspect foreign ships. Nevertheless, there are arguments that ships are over-inspected while accidents still occur. As a complementary action, some private organisations developed risk-based models, which used inspection results by PSC authorities to rate substandard ships. However, these companies provide the results of ships rating only to their clients. In this paper, it is argued that variations among PSC standards are not included in existing risk-based models. Therefore, in the proposed methodology, a Risk Accident Likelihood Tool is introduced, which is based on the reported ship deficiencies. The innovative idea is that every deficiency is weighted according to the rigorousness of the PSC recording the deficiency. This study shows that the challenges of inspection authorities are mainly caused by insufficient resources or poor organisational issues. Eventually, the proposed risk methodology provides a simplified scoring method. Ships with a high score are more likely to suffer an accident.

Evaluation of Port State Control Inspections in Türkiye

“…Looking at the academic research on port state control, it can be seen that the research is mainly on risk and performance analysis (Emecen Kara, 2018;Akpınar & Şahin, 2020;Karahalios, 2021). Studies on risk and performance analysis include "Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)" (Akyüz et al, 2016) "Fuzzy Cluster Analysis (FCA)" (Demirci et al, 2022), "Fault Tree Analysis (FTA)" (Akpınar & Şahin, 2020), "Bayesian" (Yang et al, 2018(Yang et al, , 2020Wang et al, 2021;Chuah et al, 2023), "Grey Relation Analysis (GRA)" (Lai et al, 2023), "Entropy Based Gray Relationship Analysis (GRA)" (Maşalacı & Çakır, 2023), "Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS)" (Emecen Kara, 2022;Lai et al, 2023), Excess Factor (EF) (Emecen Kara, 2016;Yılmaz, 2020).…”

“…The majority of these accidents are caused by substandard ships (Demirci & Çiçek, 2023). Substandard ships can pose serious hazards to both personnel safety and marine life (Karahalios, 2021) and have a negative effect on both the maritime security and sustainability of international trade (Chuah et al, 2023). In this context, to decrease the risks posed by maritime transportation in the world seas and to preserve both environment of marine and human life, there are many legal regulations and sanctions for ships to navigate in compliance with international standards and these are implemented by international organisation, port state and flag state Akpınar & Şahin, 2020).…”