A methodology to assess the interrelationships between contributory factors to maritime transport accidents of dangerous goods in China

Abstract

A comprehensive risk analysis methodology is proposed in the present study to evaluate the contributory factors and their hierarchical interrelationships involved in maritime transport accidents of dangerous goods (DG). The methodology integrates the advantages of decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), interpretive structure modelling (ISM) and fuzzy Bayesian network (FBN). First, 20 contributing factors are identified based on reports of 22 accidents in China, expert knowledge and literature review. DEMATEL is then utilized to visual the cause-effect relationships of contributing factors; ISM is adopted to build a hierarchical structure of contributing factors; by mapping the hierarchical structure and employing fuzzy sets to collect expert judgements, a BN model is established in the end. The results show that a more detailed quantitative assessment of risk factors contributing to maritime transport accidents of DG can be provided by applying the proposed methodology, including the influencing degree, influenced degree, centrality, causality, hierarchical relation, sensitivity degree, and important-sensitivity matrix, etc., which are unavailable in traditional risk analysis approaches.