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

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

This article presents the results of a study evaluating the International Safety Management (ISM) Code’s effects on vessel performance in port state control (PSC) inspections in Swedish ports. PSC statistics are compared and analyzed between vessels that were required to implement the Code by 1998 and vessels that were not. Additionally, the results of a survey and interviews of Swedish PSC inspectors are considered and discussed. The paper concludes that a number of indicators suggest that ISM has the potential to positively impact vessel performance in PSC inspections.

The paper evaluates effectiveness of fire drills for emergency and responding to 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 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.

Substandard ships pose a significant threat to human life and the environment. Therefore, detecting deficiencies and removing such vessels from service is necessary, which is one of the port state control (PSC) inspection tasks. In addition, the role of PSC inspection is to improve safety at sea and in ports. To be up to the task, the States jointly created several memoranda to fight against substandard ships. The most frequent deficiencies detected on ships during Paris Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) PSC inspections are analyzed in this paper. The analysis was made according to factors such as type of vessel, flag and the category to which deficiency belongs. Results revealed that most frequent deficiencies detected on ships, regardless of type or flag, come from International Safety Management (ISM) and fire protection. Furthermore, it is found that among the ten most frequent deficiencies, three are from the navigation safety category. Therefore, corrective actions to improve safety at sea are needed and presented.

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.

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

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.

This article is based on 183 819 port state control inspections from various port state control regimes for the time frame 1999 to 2004. Using binary logistic regression, we establish the differences of port state control inspections across several regimes, even though theory predicts there should be no significant differences in treatments of vessels. The results indicate that the differences towards the probability of detention are merely reflected by the differences in port states and the treatment of deficiencies and not necessarily by age, size, flag, class or owner as perceived by the industry and regulators. The analysis further shows that some differences can be found across ship types and regimes and that there appears to be room for further harmonization in the area of port state control.

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.

Port state control (PSC) inspection is an important measure to improve ship safety and reduce ship accident rate. To improve the effectiveness of PSC inspections, some MoUs have begun to implement new inspection regime (NIR). However, the effectiveness of NIR remains to be studied. Then this study aims to verify the effectiveness of NIR and improve shipping safety. In this study, Bayesian Network model is used to establish the relationship between NIR, ship deficiencies, detention and ship accident to explore the impact of NIR on maritime safety. The data in this study are from PSC inspection data in the Tokyo Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and accident data in the International Maritime Organization (IMO). By analyzing the changes of the number of ship deficiency, detention rate and accident rate before and after NIR implementation, the effectiveness of NIR can be verified. The results show that the implementation of NIR does not effectively reduce the number of substandard ships, but the number of ships with serious deficiencies is significantly reduced. However, ship accident rate has not declined. Therefore, it is believed that Tokyo MoU needs to further improve the effectiveness of NIR and strengthen supervision of defective ships.

A data-driven Bayesian model for evaluating the duration of detention of ships in 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.

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.

Remote inspection refers to an inspection where the inspector is off-site, whilst the intermediary (inspected entity, vessel’s crew or shore office personnel) is operating on-site. The process is performed via the use of technological, visual or database/portal means. The notion of remote inspections is not new in the maritime industry. The quest to apply efficient and cost-effective inspection techniques on commercial vessels has been underway for years and was closely correlated with the advancement of technology. Nevertheless, until the outbreak of the pandemic, such practices were subject to certain limitations: reliable technology and accepted procedural frameworks should be in place. These could only be applied against certain regulatory backgrounds and performed by qualified inspectors. However, during the prolonged Covid-19 pandemic crisis, unprecedented conditions emerged which significantly affected the ship inspection procedures and in particular the controls by the Port State Authorities and the inspections from energy companies, members of the Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF) Ship Inspection Report Programme (SIRE). These unforeseen conditions mandated an acceleration of pace towards the adoption of remote inspection schemes. During the pandemic, most Port States had to refrain from physically attending vessels to conduct Port State Control (PSC) inspections. Alternative means of inspections had to be employed by PSC Authorities with the aim of maintaining an acceptable level of control over substandard ships calling at their ports. Proceeding one step further, Tokyo Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has officially and permanently established a remote inspection system introducing technical specifications for remote inspections that may be conducted only with the consent of the Master. Further to the remote inspection techniques adopted by the US Coast Guard (USCG), Tokyo MoU has introduced live streaming interviews with the Master, officers and crew members. Livestreaming inspections, where the PSC officer may request the crew to visit specific areas of the vessel and witness live tests and operational controls, were established. It is anticipated that the feedback collected from the implementation of the first official remote PSC inspection regime will be exploited also by other PSC MoUs which will proceed with similar schemes in the near future. Embarking in the same direction, OCIMF, following an official announcement in August 2020, launched the remote inspection as an alternative against the restrictions imposed by the pandemic towards the physical SIRE inspections (OCIMF in Temporary guidelines for conducting a vessel inspection during Covid-19, 2020a; OCIMF in Guidelines for remote Inspections under OCIMF programmes (2nd ed.), 2020b). The option to conduct a remote SIRE inspection lies at the discretion of submitting companies, considering several factors including but not limited to the practical possibility and risks of conducting physical attendance at specific ports. The remote SIRE inspections scheme set certain standards for the development of the next Vessel’s Inspection Programme by OCIMF (SIRE 2.0) but at the same time generated concerns regarding the equal assessment of remote reports by individual OCIMF members.