A maritime oil spill risk assessment model

Abstract

Maritime oil transportation decision-making models that integrate with oil spill risk assessment methodologies are scarce. Recently, first time quantitative efforts have been developed for the maritime transportation of petroleum products. However, there still exists a serious gap in the literature concerning risk assessment models that provide a rather significant input to any maritime oil transportation model, namely the estimation and assignment of risk costs to the links of such a network. The authors first present a critical review of oil spill risk assessment efforts found in the literature and then the development of a novel oil spill risk assessment model. The goal of this risk assessment methodology is twofold: first, to determine and assign risk costs to the links of a maritime transportation network, and second, to provide insights into contributors that lead to spills. Such insights may further lead to guidelines for the prevention of future incidents leading to spills. A federal regulatory agency (such as the U.S. Coast Guard) and/or a commercial shipper may use the identification of the dominant contributors to oil spills to evaluate the merits of alternative regulatory and shipping policies that could lead to improved safety performance of the marine system. The authors finally exhibit the usage of the proposed methodology on a real case scenario.