Applying the Safety and Environmental Risk and Reliability Model (SERM) for Malaysian Langat River Collision Aversion

Introduction

Vessel collision risks in waterways are of huge consequence. Collision accident scenarios carry heavy consequence, thus their occurrence is infrequent. These accidents represent a risk because they expose vessel owners and operators, as well as the public, to the possibility of losses such as vessel and cargo damage, injuries and loss of life, environmental damage, and obstruction of waterways. They can also lead to instantaneous and point form release of harmful substances to water, air, soil and long time ecological impact (Nikolaidis, 2005). Environmental problems and the need for system reliability calls for innovative methods and tools to assess and analyse extreme operational, accidental and catastrophic scenarios as well as accounting for the human element, and integrate these into a design environments part of design objectives. Risk and reliability—based design entails the systematic integration of risk analysis in the design process targeting system risk prevention, reduction that meet high—level goals and leave allowance for integrated components of the system includes environmental conditions that will facilitate and support a holistic approach for reliable and sustainable waterways and require trade-offs and advance decision-making leading to optimal design solutions (Blischke, 2000).

Collision risk is a product of the probability of occurrence of the physical event and consequential losses. Earlier risk–modeling focused more on either frequency estimation or consequence and leave analysis with remnant uncertainties. Paralleled analysis of frequency and consequence analysis along with translation of other consequence (economic, oil spill, GHG) could lead to quantification of total collision risk. Collision data may be imperfect or inconstant, making it difficult to account for dynamic issues associated with vessels and waterway requirements. Accounting for these lapses necessitated a need to base collision analysis on hybrid use of deterministic, probabilistic or simulation methods depending on the availability of data. Collision accident consequence data are hard to come by, like accident frequency data. However, whatever data that is available should be meaningfully processed as much as possible through available tools especially predictive methods for necessary mitigation decision support for sustainable waterways system design.

Developing sustainable Inland-Water Transportation (IWT) requires transit risk analyses of waterways components and relationship between factors such as environmental conditions, vessel characteristics, operators' information about the waterway, as well as the incidence of groundings and collisions, using available data. Whatever information is available is useful for risk and reliability- based decision work of accidents rate of occurrence, consequence and mitigation (Eftratios Nikolaidis, 2005; McGee et al., 1999). The analysis considers mainly the waterways dimensions and other related variables of risk factors like operator skill, vessel characteristics, traffic characteristics, topographic, environmental difficulty of the transit, and quality of operator's information in transit which are required for decision support related to efficient, reliable and sustainable waterways developments.

This chapter discusses modeling of waterways collision risk. The paper presents the model of waterways collision risk and associated rate of occurrence and consequence. Relation with other variable risk factors like operator skill, vessel characteristics, traffic characteristics, topographic and environmental difficulty of the transit are taken into consideration (Wallace, 2000; John, 2000). Accident frequency and consequence are determined stochastically. Waterway variable and parameters are compared. The result hopes to contribute to decision support for development and regulation of inland water transportation. Also discussed is deduced generic risk mitigation option required for operational, societal, limit definition and technological change decision support for development of sustainable Inland-Water Transportation System (IWTS). The probability per year and accident consequence predicted is considered acceptable in maritime and offshore industry, but for a channel using fewer number of expected traffic, it could be considered high. Providing safety facilities like traffic separation, vessel traffic management could restore maximum sustainable use of the channel.