Dynamic reliability assessment of ship grounding using Bayesian Inference

Abstract The significant increase in the demand for shipping transportation using large vessels in restricted waters, such as cruising cargo vessels in channels, draws worldwide maritime industries’ attention to mitigating potential grounding risks. Safer ship navigation requires a more accurate prediction tool to estimate the likelihood of a ship striking the seabed. This study presents a safety framework for under keel clearance failure analysis of vessels crossing shallow waters. The developed methodology can be applied by the designers, operators and port managers to maintain their shipping fleets operating at an acceptable level of grounding safety. A Hierarchical Bayesian Analysis is applied to estimate the probability of touching the seabed based on the results of dynamic under keel clearance obtained from time-domain hydrodynamic simulations. To illustrate the application of the proposed method, the performance of a large vessel is assessed when entering the Queensland coastal zone with maximum water depth of 12 m. The framework suggests that for a safe navigation with maximum failure probability of 3 × 10 − 5 , the vessel should cross the passage at a speed lower than 3 m/s where the maximum tolerable incident wave height is 0.5 m.