Geographic Information Systems for Estimating Coastal Maritime Risk

Abstract

The U.S. Maritime Administration made a strong commitment to short-sea shipping in 2010 in America's Marine Highway Program. There are few statistics about coastal vessel traffic, however, and even less is known about casualty rates in those waters because of the absence of trip data and the relatively poor quality of casualty data. Geographic information systems (GIS) are unique tools that enable greater visualization and understanding of complex problems. A methodology was used to adapt a GIS-based highway planning traffic assignment model for use in maritime risk assessment. The planning model routed 12 years of vessel entrance and clearance data through an international waterway network to estimate the number of trips traversing network links by any number of metrics, including year, ship type, flag of registry, and draft. The risk methodology deployed a 100-mi2 mesh (10 mi × 10 mi) over the entire United States and coastal waters to estimate the highest casualty rate (casualties per million vessel trips) and casualty frequency locations.

Spatial Analysis of Maritime Accidents Using the Geographic Information System

“…Despite the tremendous efforts of different maritime organizations to achieve a safe and secure maritime transportation system, the losses through maritime accidents and incidents are still increasing that contains data models (such as features, grid, and topology) used to describe the physical world. Similar objects are grouped into layers, and information about each object is maintained in a relational database or file (10). Objects are typically represented in vector format, such as points, lines, and polygons.…”

“…Some research has estimated risk in different geographic areas using historical accident data; unfortunately, most of them were confined to relatively small geographic areas, such as a country, a river, a strait, or a port. Dobbins and Jenkins estimated coastal maritime risk in the United States using geographic information system (GIS) data by adapting a GIS-based highway planning traffic assignment model for use in maritime risk assessment (10). This was an important step in quantifying maritime risk of coastal lanes using GIS layers and databases maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency.…”

Location Science

“…Other methods such as graduated circles or choropleth maps have also been used to represent other attributes of the solution, e.g., the amount of demand left uncovered after the facilities have been located or the level of cannibalization resulting from the location of several competing facilities. These methods have been employed to good effect in numerous applications including the ones reported by Vijay et al (2005), Ghose et al (2005), Dobbins andJenkins (2011), Suárez-Vega et al (2011) and Pekin et al (2013).…”

Use of fuzzy rule-based evidential reasoning approach in the navigational risk assessment of inland waterway transportation systems

“…An Inland Waterway Transportation System (IWTS) is a complex and dynamic system in which various factors influencing each other increase the difficulty to assess its navigational risk (Zhang et al, 2014;Zhang et al, 2013;Qu et al, 2011;Dobbins & Jenkins, 2011). Furthermore, uncertainties are involved when evaluating the navigational risk of an IWTS because objective data is sometimes incomplete and its collection is costly and time consuming, especially in the situation of taking into account the factors involving human and management aspects (Pedersen, 2010;Li et al, 2012).…”