A multicriteria outranking approach for ship collision risk assessment

Abstract

The paper presents a judgmental expert-based process to assess the ship collision risk using the ELECTRE Tri-nC multiple criteria outranking method. The approach first establishes a set of criteria deemed important by navigation experts, all of them experienced nautical officers, to assess the collision risk between two ships in open waters. A deck of cards-based method is then used to determine the weights of each criterion, according to the experts’ preferences. Finally, risk categories chosen by the experts are characterised in terms of multiple reference scenarios, also provided by the experts, and the ELECTRE Tri-nC method is used to assign validation scenarios to the risk categories. The results are compared with the experts’ assessments of the collision risk for the same scenarios and also with the individual assessments made by three experts that have not participated in the development of the decision model.