Assessment of human factor contribution to risk analysis of chemical cargo shortage incidents by using intuitionistic fuzzy integrated fault tree analysis

Abstract

A shortage of chemical cargo on tanker ships refers to a situation where the declared cargo amount by the shipper is lower than the declared terminal cargo amount, or the amount specified in the Bill of Lading. As the chemical cargoes are high purity and expensive products, any shortage claims may cause high commercial loss even in small amounts. Despite the chemical transportation industry conducting some technical researches on shortage prevention, no systematic, academic and methodological study has yet been proposed which is capable of comprehensively revealing the underlying causes, their contributions to the risk of shortage. In this study, contribution of all human factor-related structural, technical and operational root causes to risk of shortage are identified. Their failure probabilities are determined by utilising Intuitionistic Fuzzy Integrated Fault Tree Analysis (IFFTA). Accordingly, the probabilistic risk of chemical cargo shortage is obtained and found to be 0.0731 and this number is validated with two different methods. It is found that direct or indirect human factors lead to cargo shortages, accounting for approximately 84% of all factors. It is believed that the proposed model provides an effective solution to mitigate the related risk by systematically revealing notable underlying human related causes.