Analyzing operational risk for small fishing vessels considering crew effectiveness

Abstract

Investigations into the causes of maritme incidents/accidents have often identified human error as one of the leading causal factors. Small vessels employed in small-scale fisheries activities, usually have little or no onboard shelter and limited navigation and safety equipment. The operator's effectiveness at the performance of their duty task is therefore critical, and they must be well-tooled to succeed. This paper presents a novel generic human factor analysis model proposed for analyzing small fishing vessel operations. Coupled with the Bayesian network the methodology is tested with a case study focused on a small fishing boat operating in the Atlantic Canada region of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. The accident occurrence likelihood is estimated and a sensitivity analysis is also performed on the model. The analyses findings show the accident's most critical influencing factors to be related to operator's actions, the natural and technological environment, unsafe management of operations, and factors associated to the vessel itself.