A comparative assessment of collision risk of manned and unmanned vessels

Abstract

It is expected that the prototypes of unmanned merchant ships will be deployed in the next few years. However, there is no specific research on whether the introduction of unmanned ships will reduce the risk of ship collision accidents in which communication between vessels is critical. This work constitutes an attempt to bridge the gap identified above by applying the Hybrid Causal Logic (HCL) methodology to model general-level collision scenarios of unmanned ships. The HCL methodology has been selected for its proven applicability to risk assessments, even when empirical data may be insufficient. Collision scenarios involving unmanned ships have been created in which manned ships of the conventional collision scenario HCL model are replaced with unmanned ships. Then, collision scenarios capturing the interactions between a manned ship and an unmanned ship were modeled. By comparing the qualitative and quantitative results of the different scenarios, we can see that the introduction of unmanned ships may effectively reduce the occurrence of ship collision accidents.