A global view on port state control: econometric analysis of the differences across port state control regimes

Port State Control inspections play a paramount role in the enhancement of maritime safety. Port State Control regimes were established to ensure sustainability of Port State Control inspections. There are a total of 10 Port State Control regimes. Although all of these Port State Control regimes inspect foreign flag ships calling on their ports in compliance with international maritime safety and pollution regulations, still different implementations exist between these Port State Control regimes. According to the detentions, 73% of flag states have different performances in Port State Control regimes. However, the uniformity in inspections and detentions is quite important in the improvement of the effectiveness of Port State Control inspections in the world. This study aims at assessing the similarities between the Port State Control regimes on the basis of the performance of flag states as regards their Port State Control inspections. The similarities of the Port State Control regimes are analyzed employing the hierarchical clustering method using the detention and deficiency rates similarity matrices, the risk levels similarity matrices of flag states, and the combined similarity matrix. Accordingly, similarities between Port State Control regimes are discussed relative to each other and the Paris memorandum of understanding.

Determination of maritime safety performance of flag states based on the Port State Control inspections using TOPSIS

Port state control (PSC) inspections, considered a crucial means of maritime safety supervision, are viewed by the industry as a critical line of defense ensuring the stability of the international supply chain. Due to the high level of globalization and strong regional characteristics of PSC inspections, improving the accuracy of these inspections and efficiently utilizing inspection resources have become urgent issues. The construction of a PSC inspection ontology model from top to bottom, coupled with the integration of multisource data from bottom to top, is proposed in this paper. The RoBERTa-wwm-ext model is adopted as the entity recognition model, while the XGBoost4 model serves as the knowledge fusion model to establish the PSC inspection knowledge graph. Building upon an evolutionary game model of the PSC inspection knowledge graph, this study introduces an evolutionary game method to analyze the internal evolutionary dynamics of ship populations from a microscopic perspective. Through numerical simulations and standardization diffusion evolution simulations for ship support, the evolutionary impact of each parameter on the subgraph is examined. Subsequently, based on the results of the evolutionary game analysis, recommendations for PSC inspection auxiliary decision-making and related strategic suggestions are presented. The experimental results show that the RoBERTa-wwm-ext model and the XGBoost4 model used in the PSC inspection knowledge graph achieve superior performance in both entity recognition and knowledge fusion tasks, with the model accuracies surpassing those of other compared models. In the knowledge graph-based PSC inspection evolutionary game, the reward and punishment conditions (n, f) can reduce the burden of the standardization cost for safeguarding the ship. A ship is more sensitive to changes in the detention rate β than to changes in the inspection rate α. To a certain extent, the detention cost CDC plays a role similar to that of the detention rate β. In small-scale networks, relevant parameters in the ship’s standardization game have a more pronounced effect, with detention cost CDC having a greater impact than standardization cost CS on ship strategy choice and scale-free network evolution. Based on the experimental results, PSC inspection strategies are suggested. These strategies provide port state authorities with auxiliary decision-making tools for PSC inspections, promote the informatization of maritime regulation, and offer new insights for the study of maritime traffic safety management and PSC inspections.

The topic of harmonizing port state control (PSC) inspections has been on the agenda of the flag state sub‐committee meeting at the International Maritime Organization in recent years. This article is based on a unique combined dataset of 183 819 PSC inspections and uses correspondence analysis to visualize differences in treatment of vessels across several PSC regimes, representing more than 50 individual port states in order to provide better insight into the areas of possible harmonization. The results show that treatment of vessels across the regimes varies, indicating room for harmonization in all inspection areas. We recommend accelerating the harmonization process by putting more emphasis on the harmonization of inspection procedures, combined training of PSC officers and the use of combined datasets across regimes, in particular in the concept of the development of the Global Integrated Ship Information System of the International Maritime Organization.

Ship detention serves as an obligatory but efficient manner in port state control (PSC) inspection, and accurate ship detention prediction provides early warning information for maritime traffic participants. Previous studies mainly focused on exploiting the relationship between ship factors (i.e., ship age and ship type) and PSC inspection reports. Less attention was paid to identify and predict the correlation between ship fatal deficiency and ship detention event. To address the issue, we propose a novel framework to identify crucial ship deficiency types with an optimized analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model. Then, the Naïve Bayes model is introduced to predict the ship detention probability considering weights of the identified crucial ship deficiency types. Finally, we evaluate our proposed model performance on the empirical PSC inspection dataset. The research findings can help PSC officials easily determine main ship deficiencies, and thus, less time cost is required for implementing the PSC inspection procedure. In that manner, the PSC officials can quickly make ship detention decision and thus enhance maritime traffic safety.

Port state control (PSC) inspection is the most important mechanism to ensure world marine safe. Recently, some SVM-based risk assessment systems have been presented in the world. They estimate the risk of each candidate ship based on its generic factors and history inspection factors to select high-risk one before conducting on-board PSC inspection. However, how to improve the performance of the PSC inspection under the situation of noisy data when applying SVM is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a new approach for PSC inspection, which uses a novel support vector machine and k-nearest neighbor (KNN-SVM) to remove noisy training examples and Bag of Words (BW) to extract some new target factors for the PSC inspection database. The experimental results show that the generalization performance and the accuracy of risk assessment are improved significantly compared to that of the traditional SVM classifier, and adapt to engineering applications.

Early warning on the ship deficiency is crucial for enhancing maritime safety, improving maritime traffic efficiency, reducing ship fuel consumption, etc. Previous studies focused on the ship deficiency exploration by mining the relationships between the ship physical deficiencies and the port state control (PSC) inspection results with statistical models. Less attention was paid to discovering the correlation rules among various parent ship deficiencies and subcategories. To address the issue, we proposed an improved Apriori model to explore the intrinsic mutual correlations among the ship deficiencies from the PSC inspection dataset. Four typical ship property indicators (i.e., ship type, age, deadweight and gross tonnage) were introduced to analyze the correlations for the ship parent deficiency categories and subcategories. The findings of our research can provide basic guidelines for PSC inspections to improve the ship inspection efficiency and maritime safety.

Is port state control influenced by the COVID-19? Evidence from inspection data

During the past decades the economic contribution of the maritime transportation to the shipping industry has been increased rapidly. This is a positive trend, but it entails many threats (e.g. human life loose, environmental threats, sea pollution etc.) for the shipping industry. Therefore, a wide range of maritime measures have been created with the aim to eliminate the safety threats. Among these measures are included the Port State Control (PSC) inspections. Since the signature of the Hague Memorandum in 1978, the Port State Control (PSC) constitutes a strategy, that is implemented worldwide, with the aim to foreflight the substandard ships. Considering the importance of the Port State Control (PSC) inspections, this is an in-depth literature review, which aims to identify the risk-based approaches that are proposed in the international literature for the improvement of the Port State Control (PSC) performance. In addition, this research aims to identify the factors that influence the (PSC) inspections based on the international literature. The sample of this literature review are 47 academic articles which have been published in high quality journals. A total of 28 papers identified which proposed risk-based approaches for the improvement of the Port State Control (PSC) inspections’ performance. Additionally, a total of 19 papers were identified which examined the factors that influence the Port State Control (PSC) performance. The research results, shown that most of the selected papers focus on the data driven Bayesian Networks (BN). Fewer studies have been published on other approaches such as on the Support Vector Machine (SVM) method, the Bayesian Networks (BN) and game mode and the K-nearest neighbor. As concerning the factors, which influence the Port State Control (PSC) inspections, the research results show that 17 out 19 researches, which examined in this Dissertation, focused on the following factors: the ship age, the ship flag, the inspection history and the classification society.

This article uses data generated by Port State Control (PSC) inspections of ships in national ports (Paris MoU) to assess their compliance with radio-communications safety regulations. By mainly applying binary logistic regression methods, the aim is to examine and understand the relationship between the severity of deficiencies in maritime communications and some characteristics of inspected ships. The raw data from the PSC detention database from 2005 to 2022 undergoes post-processing before being analyzed to explore patterns and coincidences with the rest of the potential risk areas. To do so, 23,725 PSC inspections were used. Several classification criteria have been proposed that can better gauge the risk related to distress communications at sea from the dataset. The results connect the probability of detention with the ship age at the inspection date, the flag of the registry, the type of ship, and the location of the port within the countries adhering to the Paris MoU. Another achievement is that the number of PSC inspections of maritime communications in a given period is a better indicator of the risk to safety than the total number of deficiencies detected in these inspections during the same period. This study also explores inspection deficiencies related to competency gaps identified in the Global Maritime Distress Safety System (GMDSS) operators, and precisely using the number of PSC inspections as a criterion of risk for safety is consistent with the recommendations of the Maritime Safety Committee Circular (2006), MSC.1/Circ.1208. Another finding from the time series is that a greater rate of decrease is identified for GMDSS equipment-related deficiencies compared to GMDSS training-related deficiencies. This alone poses a review of the refreshing courses and methods to maintain the General Operator Certificate (GOC) qualification to operate maritime radio communications facilities belonging to the (current and future) GMDSS.

The paper evaluates effectiveness of fire drills for emergency and responding to Port State Control (PSC) inspections on board. A brief background about the PSC inspection on fire drills on board is introduced in the beginning. Then the significance of effectiveness evaluation on fire drills is presented. Next, legal ground is discussed on International Conventions, including regulation of related regional group, national maritime laws and rules and Concentrated Inspection Campaign (CIC). Furthermore, PSC New Inspection Regime (NIR) for Paris Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and Tokyo MOU are also discussed, and many deficiencies related to fire safety measures found in the PSC inspection are statistically analyzed. More importantly, the paper introduces System Engineering Theory, presents the principle and method of effectiveness evaluation, focuses on the preparation, performance and rehabilitation of fire drill and develops the Criterion of Effectiveness Evaluation. Finally, some suggestions are raised to carry out effectiveness evaluation for emergency and responding to the PSC inspection.

Econometric analysis on the effect of port state control inspections on the probability of casualty

Differences in deficiency types causing ship detentions at the Black Sea Region during the Covid-19 pandemic and pre-pandemic

Incorporation of deficiency data into the analysis of the dependency and interdependency among the risk factors influencing port state control inspection

The inspection of foreign-flagged ships in a state’s ports and anchorages for the purpose of monitoring compliance with international standards, known as ‘port state control’, has become necessary due to ineffective control by flag states over their vessels. Measures of effectiveness of port state control invariably focus upon the quantitative outcomes of inspections, deficiencies and detentions. This paper focuses on how effectively port state control is being delivered in the Asia-Pacific region on a qualitative basis and, in particular, it considers whether the strategic objective of the Asia-Pacific port state control regime, the Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control in the Asia-Pacific Region (Tokyo MOU),1 is being achieved. The starting point is to recall the concept of port state control and its development from a unilateral reactive measure by coastal states to a multilateral proactive control mechanism supported by international law. The structure, membership and capability of the Tokyo MOU is examined, including the flag state record of member authorities.2 Port state control performance of the Tokyo MOU is analysed using published statistics with comparative analysis undertaken of the European port state control regime - the Paris MOU. The paper identifies issues and challenges for member authorities of the Tokyo MOU in meeting its objectives. The components of the Tokyo MOU’s strategic objectives are then examined to determine whether they are being achieved. A number of recommendations are made.