
International Journal
on Marine Navigation
and Safety of Sea Transportation
Volume 4
Number 2
June 2010
223
1 INTRODUCTION
The safety of the ship system could be considered
as a series of barriers or against the potential for
failure. These barriers may include hardware, soft-
ware, and the human element and the presence of
one or more of the barriers will prevent accidents
from happening. But it happens that the safety barri-
ers are penetrated and an accident occurs.
Figure 22. Ships accident statistic, American Bureau of Ship-
ping, 2004
Very often when an incident has occurred, once
tends to interpret the past, prior to the event, only in
terms of its bearing on that event which means that
the total contemporaneous context is missing. So
once concentrate only on “significant” event’s
chains.
2 THE SYSTEM
2.1 The ship system
The ship safety model should cover the ship geo-
graphically and all the installed systems including
propulsion and electric power production, energy
production, emergency power, bridge systems, safe-
ty systems, human factor and passenger related sys-
tems.
The necessary methodology consists of following
stages, (Soares, Teixeira, 2001):
1 Generic Ship Model
2 Topographical Safety Block Diagram
3 Ship Safety Model
Generic Ship Model describes how all the ship
functions, subsystems and systems, influence the
ship safety. Importance of each component should
be clearly defined. Generic Ship Model could be fur-
ther utilized as a basis for comprehensive Ship Safe-
ty model.
Specific criteria should be developed to enable ef-
ficient estimation of the crew influence on the ship
safe factor.
Serie1;
Human
Factor;
44%
Serie1;
Device
Failure;
40,00%;
40%
Serie1;
Hydromet
eorologica
l
conditio…
Serie1;
Human Factor
Device Failure
Hydrometeorolo
gical conditions
Others
Finite Discrete Markov Model of Ship Safety
L. Smolarek
Gdynia Maritime University, Gdynia, Poland
ABSTRACT: The ship safety modeling is the process used to convert information from many sources about
the ship as an antropotechnical system into a form so that it can be analyzed effectively. The first step is to fix
the system (ship, human, environment) boundaries to clearly identify the scope of the analysis. The ship can
be generally defined by conceptual sketches, schematics drawings or flow diagrams to establish the element
hierarchy which evolves from the physical and functional relationships. The man could be generally defined
by the operational procedures. The environment could be generally defined by the mission place and time of
the year. The information is needed considering that the accidents are caused by factors associated with ship
(failure, design defect), man (human error, workload), and environment. Safety is a system property that we
intuitively relate to a system’s design, accident rates and risk. This work proposes finite discrete Markov
model as an example of systematic approach to the analysis of ship safety.