ABSTRACT: The quantification of safety and ease is an essential aspect of risk assessment in the context of inland waterway navigation using ship handling simulators. This task involves deriving and analysing quantifiable parameters from inherently complex manoeuvres, including ship kinematics and waterway-specific measures. The main challenge lies in establishing a systematic and standardized approach that can be applied to a broad variety of manoeuvres. In this paper, we introduce a data-driven method for assessing the safety and ease of inland waterway navigation, including ship and waterway related parameters extracted from simulation data. What is novel about this method is the spatially-resolved evaluation of the parameters, allowing for precise identification of local critical situations along the waterway. The method is extended by averaging the parameters across multiple simulations, which reduces the influence of outliers and highlights critical situations that persist across simulations. We demonstrate our method's universal applicability with three representative case studies on German inland waterways: a lock entry in Schwabenheim on the River Neckar, a sharp river bend near Reibersdorf on the River Danube and an entry into a planned rest harbour in Niedermörmter on the River Rhine.

KEYWORDS: Safety of Navigation, Ship Handling Simulator, Risk Assessment, Inland Navigation, Decision Support System (DSS), Simulation, Ship Manoeuvering, Navigational Safety Assessment

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