Bayesian network to predict environmental risk of a possible ship accident

The goal of the AMINESS project is to promote shipping safety in the Aegean Sea though a web portal offering different levels of access to relevant stakeholders such as ship owners, policy makers, the scientific community and the general public. The portal will have three principle uses. The first is to suggest both vessel and environmentally optimal safe route planning for ships. The second is to produce alerts for ships in real time with respect to potential hazards associated to other ships, as a function of its location and planned route, its cargo and the meteorological/sea conditions. Finally, the third is to support policy recommendations, through analysis of historical data in short and long term periods that correlate safety with ship trajectories. To that end, the risk of a possible accident occurrence in the Aegean Sea is being calculated using Bayesian networks (BN). Two types of accident scenarios (collision and grounding) have been studied. A simplified Bayesian model has been developed to predict the risk of an accident given the main characteristics of the vessel, namely the ship type, size, age and flag, which are inputted to the present model. The appropriate input data has been provided by the AIS (Automatic Identification System) sign us with. Training of the developed Bayesian network was performed using the data of both the historical accident database of Marine Rescue Coordination Center and the AIS and some use cases in the area of Aegean Sea is presented in this paper.